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BODY AND WILL 



BODY AND WILL 



BEING 



AN ESSAY CONCERNING WILL 



IN ITS 



METAPHYSICAL, PHYSIOLOGICAL, AND PATHOLOGICAL 

ASPECTS 




y by 

HENRY MAUDSLEY, M. D 



ATJTIIOE OF 



11 BODY AND MIND," " PHYSIOLOGY OF THE MIND," M PATHOLOGY OP THE MIND," 
" RESPONSIBILITY IN MENTAL DISEASE " 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1, 8, and 5 BOND STREET 

1884 



\\ 



^ 



PBEEACE 



This essay has had its beginnings in lectures and addresses 
which I have given on different occasions during the last 
ten years ; the themes of which were Conscience and Organi- 
sation, the Physical Basis of Will, Lessons of Materialism, 
and the like. The design, entertained vaguely for some time, 
of collecting them into a book was abandoned, because it was 
evident that the treatment of the subject in that loose way 
would not be sufficiently concise and methodical, or indeed 
adequate. Thereupon this essay on Will in its metaphysical, 
physiological, and pathological relations was undertaken, in 
order to have unity of subject and to treat it systematically 
and with more pretence to completeness. The freedom of 
a spiritual will being the stronghold of a metaphysical 
psychology, there can be no accusation of evading difficul- 
ties when that is selected as test-subject of the value of 
the doctrines arrived at by the positive method of observation 
and induction. If the method fails there, its fundamental 
incompetence must be frankly admitted. 

I am not ignorant that those who are adepts in the schools 
of high mental philosophy may think the essay to be a weak 
intrusion into their high domains ; for I must confess to being 
unable to use their language with a satisfactory sense of 
having clear and definite ideas beneath its terms, to having 
no proper faith in their methods, and to having failed to 
gather from their works fruits of any practical use. From 



VI ' PEEFACE. 

their standpoint they may be satisfied to dismiss it as of no 
philosophical concern to them. Its justification from my 
standpoint is, that I have been engaged all my life in dealing 
with mind in its concrete human embodiments, and that in 
order to find out why individuals feel, think, and do as they 
do, how they may be actuated to feel, think, and do differently, 
and in what way best to deal with them so as to do one's 
duty to oneself and to them, I have had no choice but to 
leave the barren heights of speculation for the plains on 
which men live and move and have their being. It is not 
enough to think and talk about abstract minds and their 
qualities when you have to do with concrete minds that 
must be observed, studied, and managed. 

The essay will not be in vain if it serve to bring home 
to mental philosophers the necessity of taking serious account 
of a class of facts and thoughts which, though they are not 
philosophy, may claim not to be ignored by philosophy. 
After all, it will not be labour lost, since they may well spare 
a little time from their work of saying over and over again, 
in different and not always clearer language, what was 
said more than two thousand years ago, and of diligently 
endeavouring to do now by the same method what men of 
not less philosophical aptitudes and capacities failed to do 
then. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 
WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

SECTION PAGB 

I. The Theory op Freewill and its Difficulties ... 1 



II. What Consciousness tells us concerning Will 
nr. Concerning the Authority of Consciousness 
IV. The Positive Assurance of Consciousness 

V. The Physical Basis of Conscious Identity . 
VI. Concluding Reflections 



15 

36 
56 

71 
87 



PART II. 

WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL, SOCIAL, AXD 
EVOLUTIONAL RELATIONS. 

I. Its Physiological Basis 09 

IT. Concerning the Notion of Necessity 128 

III. Involution and Evolution 128 

IV. Mental Evolution and the Social Medium . . . . 149 
V. The Social Fusion of Egoisms 163 

VI. The Coercing Forces of Social Union 17.-, 

VII. Certain Mental Products of Evolution .... 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



PART III. 
WILL IN ITS PATHOLOGICAL RELATIONS. 

BBCnON PAGE 

L Concerning Degeneration . . . . . . . . 237 

II. Congenital Deficience or Absence of Moral Feeling 

and Will 243 

III. Degeneration of Moral Feeling and Will in Disease . 257 

IV. The Moral Sense and Will in Criminals . . . . 276 
V. Disorders of Will in Mental Derangement . . . 283 

VI. The Disintegrations of the 'Ego' 301 

VII. What will be the End thereof? 317 



CONCEKNING WILL 

PAET I. 

WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT, 



SECTION I. 

THE THEORY OP FEEEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 

In certain rural districts it is the custom to speak of a child 
that has been born out of wedlock as a ' chance- child/ and of 
its mother as having had a ' misfortune ; ' not that any one 
really believes the living event to have come by chance, in 
violation of ordinary law, without conceivable cause, but it 
is an indirect way of intimating that it ought not rightly to 
have come, and that it is not certain who has been concerned 
in the begetting of it. One may compare this way of speak- 
ing of a natural event to that used by many of the advocates 
of the freedom of the will, who are accustomed to speak of an 
act of will as if it were a chance-event; thereby meaning, or 
persuading themselves they mean, not that some part of the 
will, its inmost essence, is outside the reach of present ex- 
planation, but that it is actually outside the order of natural 
causation : that will is essentially a self-procreating, self- 
sustaining spiritual entity, which owns no natural cause, 
obeys not law, and has no sort of affinity with matter. An 
immaterial entity in a material world, the events of which 
it largely determines — such the signal and singular position 
claimed for it. 



2 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

For the most part those who uphold a power of this kind, 
self-determined and self -determining, free not merely to act 
but to he, do not go so far as to say that motives are not at 
work continually in the mind, or that the will takes no 
account of them ; what they do earnestly protest is, that in 
the motivation of will there is not the uniform, inseparable 
connection between motive and will which there is between 
cause and effect in physical nature. In the internal world 
of mind there is the self-consciousness of a freedom that 
is not perceivable nor conceivable in the external world of 
matter : the particular will is not the unconditionally 
necessary consequent of antecedent motives. It, or some 
allied entity in the individual, which, having abstracted it 
virtually from the concrete self, they call his non-bodily self, 
has a spontaneous, independent, arbitrary power to make 
this or that motive preponderate as it pleases, to choose this 
or that one among motives and to make it the motive ; in 
doing which the self-determining principle is held by some 
to act without motive, of its own internal motion, without 
other cause or reason than pure self-evolution ; by others, 
however, who think it not self-sufficing enough to dispense 
entirely with motives, to take remote account only of motives 
of so high and superlatively refined a nature that they do 
not weigh at all upon its freedom, insinuating themselves 
into its essence without actuating it, permeating and inspir- 
ing it without in the least constraining it. 

It would seem a small matter whether such exceedingly 
subtile and highly sublimed motives are admitted or not ; 
since, so far as there is the assumption of a kind of power, 
little or much, fine or coarse, which is above the reach of 
actuating motives and able nevertheless to work as it likes 
upon motives, absolutely free and independent in that func- 
tion, we are no whit better off than if we assumed off-hand 
an arbitrary, self-determining power which could do entirely 
without motives. The initial difficulty is the capital one — 
namely, the conception, in any degree, of a power in nature 
so extraordinary, coming from an unknown without, having 
no genesis but an auto-genesis, deriving its subsequent 
energy from nothing but itself, subject to no laws of growth, 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 3 

though manifestly growing in the individual with his mental 
growth ; a power which, notwithstanding that it works as a 
part of nature, is not of the same kind nor has anything in 
common with anything else there — is without sympathy, 
affinity, or relationship with the things which it works in 
and upon. It is not entirely right to describe it as super- 
natural since it thus works naturally and constantly in the 
events of the world : supernatural it is in the primal source 
and perpetual renewal of its energy, inscrutably unnatural 
in the mode of its union with the natural. 

If there be a power of this kind in the universe, the 
obvious and instant reflection is that causation is not uni- 
versal, as all the world is in the habit of thinking and say- 
ing ; that there is a large region of human events which lies 
outside the otherwise uniform law of cause and effect. It is 
a conclusion which cannot be evaded ; for to say that events 
depend upon the will, and in their capacity of events are 
natural, and not to ask at all upon what their cause depends 
when it is will, may be lawful and right in pure metaphysics, 
but would be disastrous folly in physics. . Were the conclu- 
sion rigorously admitted it would be necessary to repudiate 
all attempts to foresee, formulate, or reckon upon human 
events in so far as they are effects of will ; for how reduce 
to laws phenomena which are the workings of a power that 
is itself above the reach of natural law? Unawares we find 
ourselves drifted by the theory into the startling necessity 
of supposing that the sum of energy in the universe is not a 
constant quantity ; that the law of conservation of energy, 
though a most useful work-a-day theory, is at bottom an 
illusive hypothesis even within the limits of human experi- 
ence ; that there are now, and have been since creation's dawn, 
countless myriads of sources of self-creating energy which 
have poured their multitudinous streams into it continually. 
Creation of energy without end, infinite effect without cause! 
The great natural argument for the existence of God has 
always been that everything within human cognisance must 
have a cause, such being the necessity of human thought, 
and that for final cause of all things, except itself, there 
must be a cause of causes, a great First Cause. What then 



4 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

of the will ? We are brought at the outset to a perplexing 
dilemma — to the obligation of confessing either that the 
will, like every other mode of natural energy, must have a 
cause, or that a great First Cause is not a necessity of human 
thought. 

In truth, we are tacitly to understand that it has a cause 
— namely, the will of God, inciting or restraining. Although 
not governed by motives and without any touch of earthly 
affinity, the upholders of a free will acknowledge willingly 
that it is wrought upon continually and effectively by that 
supernatural energy. A Divine grace is always at hand to 
give it help in time of need, inspiring and strengthening it 
to do well, dissuading or withholding it from doing ill.J It is 
God's good purpose, says that learned divine, Dr. Isaac 
Barrow, l to master our will, and to make us surrender and 
resign it to His just, wise, and gracious will ; ' and to make 
good His right ' God bendeth all His forces and applieth all 
His means, both of sweetness and severity, persuading us by 
arguments, soliciting us by entreaties, alluring us by fair 
promises, scaring us by fierce menaces, indulging ample 
benefits to us, working in and upon us by secret influences 
of grace, by visible dispensations of providence.' A stu- 
pendous array of motives, which it is a standing wonder 
any one ever withstands, seeing that they are wielded by the 
power of Omnipotence and guided by the insight of Omnisci- 
ence. The odd and perplexing thing is that we are required 
to believe that the operation of these mighty agencies is 
nowise incompatible with the perfect freedom of the will, 
which indeed is supposed to be most free when it has sur- 
rendered itself to entire obedience. No doubt when it has thus 
made an entire surrender of itself, and become, so to speak, 
the pure channel of the Divine will, it is of the same holy 
kind, one with it, truly God in man ; and without doubt, too, 
it is then at its best estate, most free, since it has reached in 
the completest discharge of its possible functions the fullest 
perfection of which its individual nature is capable ; but 
with all that it is not easy to understand how it can be said 
to be free in the sense of not being determined. The free- 
dom of the fullest expression of energy belonging to the 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 5 

highest nature of a thing is intelligible ; the freedom of an 
energy from any mode of determination is not intelligible to 
human apprehension, which apprehends only under the 
category of causation. Instinctively urged by this difficulty 
the theologians have found it necessary to call in the will of 
God as supreme determinant. Perhaps, however, they 
might maintain, if challenged directly and pressed to answer, 
that the high intuitions of consciousness are not fettered to 
apprehend under the category of causation. 

So it has come to pass that, accepting the doctrine of 
invariable law in the physical world, they hold that the spirit 
of man stands above such, physical laws and i can co-operate 
with God Himself.' They believe that they can by such 
Divine co-operation fetter and so ennoble their wills, until 
they are finally delivered from the melancholy liberty of 
doing evil, and placed under the happy necessity of doing 
well. So believing, their consistent prayer is the prayer 
of Malebranche to be delivered from the fatal liberty of 
doing wrong, 1 and to feel themselves in the grasp of the 
hand of God, which will never let them go. 2 The highest 
evolution of freewill is freely to lose its freedom. Nor is 
this to be deemed, as to vulgar apprehension it might seem, 
a contradiction in terms, or the use of one term to negate 
the definite meaning of another, and so to leave both with 
the appearance of life in them but with all meaning taken out 
of them; rather it is to have the deep metaphysical sense of a 
mystical union of gaping inconsistencies or of actual contra- 
dictories which reaches its climax in the identification of 
opposites. In this relation, however, it will not be amiss to 
remember, by way of caution, that many persons do not 
thoroughly consider whether they distinctly know their own 
meaning, but deceive themselves in imagining that they 
have any distinct meaning at all ; and that of the two issues 

1 Sauveur des p£cheurs, venez me delivrer de cette fatale liberty que j'ai 
de mal faire, de la certitude du peche, de ce pouvoir que je n'ai que trop 
d'abuser du mouvement que Dieu ne me donne que pour m'elever jusqu'a lui. 
— Malebranche, Meditations Chrcticnnc*. 

a ' The devout man,' says Foster, in his essay on Habit in Religion* 
Character, 'feels this confirmed habit as the grasp of the band of God. 
which will never let him go.' 



6 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

— first, that opposites are identical ; secondly, that meaning- 
less propositions are made — the latter is the more probable. 

The consistent advocates of the Divine inspiration of 
the truly free will nsed at one time to make large appeal to 
the will of the Devil, who worked through the evil desires and 
passions with which he inspired human breasts. Presumably 
there was a perfect construction of the brain in the first man, 
and for that reason there was no let or hindrance to an entire 
obedience of the perfect will in him to the perfect will of 
God ; but unhappily injury was done to this excellent struc- 
ture by the fall in Eden, and so the arch-enemy of mankind 
gained admission and made his congenial home there. They 
recognised justly, as moralists have always done, the existence 
of a double nature in fallen man — the higher and the lower 
nature, the spirit and the flesh, the good and the bad angel 
in him, the old Adam and the new creature — in like manner 
as they recognised two principles, a good and an evil one, 
warring always against one another in the outer world ; and 
the Devil they acknowledged to be the lord of the part of 
man's nature the inclinations of which were evilwards. 
' Doth Job serve God for naught ? ' cynically asks Satan, 
deeply sensible of the influence of motives upon the will to 
make it do well; and in the operation of the successive 
motives, each weighing more heavily, which he brings to 
bear upon Job in order to make him curse God, he affords us 
an illustration of the way in which he works upon the will 
to make it do ill. But it was plainly necessary, on the theory 
of a Devil always at work to beleaguer and besiege the 
citadel of human virtue, to limit his power, as God limited 
it in the interesting psychological experiment which in a 
caprice of freewill he suffered him to make upon Job ; 
otherwise what would have become of human freedom ? 
Had man been left under the melancholy necessity of doing 
evil, where would have been the happy liberty of loving God 
and of doing that which was right in His sight ? 

It was necessary that the Devil should have not un- 
limited power, but full power only to work his worst within 
fixed bounds; first, because he was in the ultimate event 
controlled by Divine power, who hath put all things under 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 7 

Hiui, and without whom was nothing made that is made— 
not excepting the Devil and his deeds — and who (according 
to the Westminster Confession of Faith) has for ' the mani- 
festation of His glory predestinated some men and angels 
unto everlasting life and preordained others to everlasting 
death, to the praise of His glorious justice ; ' and, secondly, 
because He wrought through the passions and other low 
impulses of the human heart, which, by the antecedent 
postulate as to the will's nature, could not cross the inter- 
vening gulf to touch its inmost self-determining essence. It 
would be well could we have it plainly expounded some- 
where why this inmost spiritual essence, being untouched by 
earthly affection or hindrance, unswayed by motive, accessi- 
ble only to Divine influence, absolutely free to do as it likes, 
at any rate in the way of well-doing, does not like to rule as 
it might ; but it is a problem which is suffered to remain 
as obscure as the question why the pure essence can 
habitually and easily cross the gulf between itself and the 
physical organism, when the gulf is quite impassable in the 
opposite direction. However that may be, it is plain that 
we have no means by which we can measure and register the 
quantity and kind of energy which the Devil exerts upon 
the will within the bounds set to his operations — no workable 
Diabolometer or Satanometer so to speak — and that we have 
here again a large region of human events which is outside 
the natural law of causation, and therefore outside the range 
of scientific knowledge ; a region, moreover, of quite unknown 
extent, seeing that it is impossible to define its limits or to 
get them defined. Apart, then, from the disturbing and 
undefinable operations of an undetermined will in human 
events, we have the disturbing and undefinable operations of 
will determined by diabolic power. Meanwhile, if we are 
really to think of freedom as absolute and perfect in man — a 
perfect freedom from the necessity of any antecedence — we 
ought logically to think of it as free from all influence of 
God or Devil, as will, that is, in which the Omnipresent is 
not present and the Omnipotent has no power. 

Notwithstanding these theories of a will that is itself 
an inexhaustible source of self -procreating energy and of acts 



8 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

of will instigated by supernatural agency, men have always 
conducted practical life on an implicit theory of a quite 
opposite nature ; they have lived and acted in all places and 
at all times and on all occasions as if the will were governed 
by natural motives, and as if its operations could be reckoned 
upon with some assurance. The dogma of freewill has been 
a cherished dogma of the study, but it has not imbued the 
regulations made for the conduct of life ; exalted and 
esteemed as a theoretical article of faith, it has not been used 
as a working belief in human affairs ; an ideal of the imagi- 
nation inspired by the heart, it has had no place in the work 
of the practical understanding. When it has been neces- 
sary so to train men as to be able to rely upon their conduct 
with certitude in the most arduous circumstances, they have 
been subjected to stern discipline by the rigid enforcement 
of uniform motives ; and accordingly the military organisa- 
tion affords the best example of a case in which, the exact 
nature and number of the motives being known, their opera- 
tion on will is plainly shown and confidently counted on. Were 
the motives as definite and as exactly known in every other 
case, and their secret operations through their manifold 
indirect, subtile and circuitous paths traced with equal 
plainness, is it not likely that a similar uniformity would 
be made known ? 

Laws have been made from the earliest times and punish- 
ments inflicted systematically upon lawbreakers under the 
tacit implication that will is not an undetermined power, but 
that it may be influenced by motive to act in this way or 
that. The execution of a murderer would be of no use as a 
warning to likeminded evildoers had they the freedom of will 
not to be moved by the example ; the aim and use of punish- 
ment are to determine the ill-disposed will from the direction 
of wrong-doing and to constrain it to take the path of a higher 
and freer development in well-doing. And that has plainly 
been the slow effect of the administration of laws upon the 
conscience of mankind through the ages ; necessary in the 
first instance to constrain moral action, and by repetition so 
in the course of generations to ingrain the habit of it as a 
moral feeling, they become unnecessary as determinants in 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 9 

well-constituted beings, once the sense of right and wrong 
has become instinct in their natures. In such case the 
reasoned object fades out of sight, and the operation becomes 
immediate and instinctive ; it is an instance of use-made 
nature such as is seen everywhere in the transformation of 
laborious conscious into easy automatic function. Moral de- 
velopment of the individual is a growth of will in the line of 
good motive, moral deterioration a growth of will in the line 
of bad motive. The progress of mankind from lower to 
higher planes of thought, feeling and doing is the record of 
better action founded on and guided by wiser insight, and of 
the development of better feeling in consequence : higher 
feeling has followed improved thinking and acting, and so 
the quality of the will has been raised. 

No one disputes that a knowledge of the past actions of 
men in different situations and circumstances of life is the 
foundation of a knowledge of the springs of human action on 
which we rely in our present and count in our future dealings 
with them. The study of history would be a barren labour 
if the operations of a self-determining entity left no room 
for dependence upon the determining effects of motives, nor 
would the most sagacious statesman in that case be any 
better off in the functions of government, notwithstanding 
a lifelong experience, than a fool. In every department of 
human activity the person who has had experience is 
esteemed a wiser guide than the new comer, because of the 
certitude that the thoughts and acts of men are not in any 
respect chance-events, but that what they have done before 
they will do again when actuated by similar motives in 
similar circumstances. The systematic provisions made for 
the education and training of the young — which are really 
means to manufacture them to an approved pattern by im- 
planting in them the customary habits of thinking, feeling 
and willing of the community — social institutions and 
usages, forethought and skill in the conduct of affairs, all 
the operations of daily life in the intercourse of sane men 
are based upon the tacit implication that acts of will are 
not motiveless and haphazard, but conform to law and 
may be counted upon. Do T submit a dispute to an im- 



10 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

partial judge in the full assurance of having justice done to 
me, I do it because I believe that he will decide according 
to well-weighed reasons of law, and because I do not believe 
in the hazard of his freewill. If a person of acknowledged 
probity and of known purity of life were suddenly to do 
something grossly immoral, and it were impossible to 
discover any motive for his strange and aberrant deed, we 
should ascribe it to an alienation of nature, and say that 
he must be mad. Let the will be free in the full meta- 
physical sense of the word, and it would be impossible to 
run an express train from London to York or to cross the 
Atlantic in a steamboat with the least assurance of safety. 
Did not men in some measure foresee the acts of their fellows 
from a knowledge of the operations of motives in their minds, 
they would have to await them in helpless uncertainty, as 
they await the decrees of the will of God. 

The person who answers best, who alone answers near, 
to the metaphysical definition of freewill is the madman, 
since he exults in the most vivid sense of freedom and power, 
heeds not any counsels of reason, and does things which he 
does not himself foresee or meditate a moment beforehand, 
and which certainly no one can foretell ; if it be not that he 
acts without motives, he acts from motives of which he is 
not conscious, and which no other person can penetrate. 
Consciousness plays him an ill trick ; for while he is really 
the least free of men, irresponsible, his disease not he 
instigating his deeds, it inspires an intense and exulting 
conviction of the highest freedom. Is it not obvious that if 
sane men possessed free wills, they, like the madman, would 
be free from responsibility, since their wills would act in- 
dependently of their characters, just as they listed — not 
otherwise than as a wayward wind was once supposed to 
blow capriciously c where it listeth ' — and that no one would 
have much, if any, motive left to try to better his character ? 
For why take diligent thought and pains to build up good 
motives into the structure of a character, and to reject bad 
motives, if he be subject to the chance of a freewill which 
need take no account of them ? Consider this difficulty : if 
there be complete equilibrium, a perfect indifference, there 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 11 

will be no decision ; if a decision in equilibrium, the fact is 
inconsistent with any essential connection between character 
and action. 

No deep attention to their writings is needed to discover 
that the moral and religious authors who nurse the most 
fervent conviction of freewill, and reject passionately the 
notion of necessity in human actions, do nevertheless use 
language habitually which is imbued with the implication 
of determination, containing it, as it were, b} r silent involu- 
tion. 1 Indeed, it is impossible for them to help it : the fact 
is embodied in all the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, even 
the modes of sensibility, of mankind, and in the inmost 
texture of the language by which expression is given to them ; 
for such thoughts, feelings, and words are possible to any 
individual now by virtue only of the law-governed acquisi- 
tions, the experience-built mental structure, of an infinite 
succession of generations of men. The exquisitely nice and 
fine movements which we perform in each act of seeing or 
hearing, without being in the least aware of them, represent 
the sum of an incalculable multitude of slowly elaborated 
experiences that have been organised as faculties or func- 
tions : they are virtually unconscious reasonings. Our intui- 
tion of space may well be in like manner the consolidations 
of an infinite succession of human experiences that defi- 
nite movements on our part have always definite and 
uniform results which, when making them, we can definitely 
reckon on. 

Be that so or not, however, there is not a word we utter, 
not a movement we make, not a sensation we experience, 
not a tool we make use of, not an article of clothing we 
wear, that has not the same far-reaching significance. Our 
forefathers, by intending their minds to realities, have 
established a harmony of thought with external nature 
which is a pre-established harmony in our nature. ' Oblige 
me with a light ' is a trivial favour which one man begs and 
obtains of another, hardly deeming that he is asking a favour 

1 To say that the will chooses which motives to reject, and which to accept, 
what is that but to imply that it cannot act from the motives that it rejects, 
and must act in accordance with the motives that it accepts ? 



12 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

at all ; and yet if we consider the matter closely, and unfold 
the constitutional history of the event, so to speak, the request 
has stupendous contents ; for what a long succession of toils 
and troubles, ingenuities and endeavours, trials and failures, 
accidental hits and misses of experiment, tedious steps of 
improvement it implies from the time when fire had not yet 
eeen discovered to the time — only some fifty years ago — 
when the lucifer match was invented ! Before the person 
who asks the little favour exerts his freewill to ask it he 
ought to make a sort of silent recognition of the successive 
ages of human culture to the fruits of whose labours he is a 
joyful heir. Happy for him that they did not content them- 
selves with capricious freaks of freewill, beginning nowhere 
and ending nowhere, but with many halting experiments, 
with slowly gained insight and tedious labour, patiently 
making each toilsome step gained the basis of new efforts to 
reach a higher step, multiplied their relations with nature, 
and brought themselves into ever-widening and closer 
harmony with the order thereof ; so endowing him with a 
large capital of silent wisdom to start with, with the 
capacities of definite desires to urge him in the directions of 
progress, and with built up faculties of will to execute his 
desires. 

To set forth explicitly in formal knowledge what is im- 
plicit in the whole course and conduct of human life would 
unquestionably be the exposition of a system of philosophy 
in which a self-determining principle had no place — in which 
a free, in the sense of an undetermined, will would be a 
meaningless superfluity. But is it not the fact that know- 
ledge has its foundation in experience, and is the conscious 
exposition of what is unconsciously implied in human pro- 
gress ; that it exists in fact before it is self-conscious in 
thought? Implicit in action before it is explicit in formal 
thought, it grows out of the twilight of instinct into the 
daylight of clear consciousness ; nay, perhaps we must go 
deeper than instinct, into the complete darkness of vital 
relations, in order to reach the foundations of that which 
we know self-consciously as reason. It is proposed nowa- 
days to get a sound and substantial knowledge of the laws 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AKD ITS DIFFICULTIES. 13 

of thought by a careful study of its genesis ; the purpose is 
good, but it cannot plainly be accomplished by a method of 
introspection, which will never take us back to the be- 
ginnings, since the faculty of it comes to maturity only 
ten thought has reached a high development. Is it then 
a sympathetic study of the mental phenomena of animals 
and infants that we shall succeed better ? It is a method 
of much fruitful promise, but at the same time inadequate 
and apt to be misleading, since we are unable to enter into 
the comparative simplicity of their minds with a corre- 
sponding simplicity of mind, and so are apt to misread and 
misinterpret the signs that we observe ; and in the best 
event it is not sufficing, since it starts a long way from the 
actual genesis. ( Only by a close objective study of the un- 
conscious operations of thought-generating organic matter 
shall we ever attend at the birth of thought. Find out the 
laws of adaptive interaction, in their simplest expression, of 
that organic matter which, when its energies rise above the 
horizon of consciousness, we call reason, and you will arrive 
at the foundation-facts of the highest thoughtv So far as the 
Amoeba reasons — and reason unconsciously it does in so far 
as it makes vital adaptations to its surroundings — it exhibits 
the principle of that which in its more complex evolution in 
the brains of the higher animals and of man is reason. 

By a study of the operations of intelligence in its highest 
developments we perceive a reverse operation that brings us 
to the same physical result — namely, to reason become habit 
or instinct, that is to say, to reason incorporate in structure. 
The simplest proposition we can make — as, for example, 
that the dog barks — which seems neither to need nor to 
admit analysis, means actually the consolidation of as many 
laborious acquisitions as an habitual act which looks equally 
simple, since we perforin it without knowing it, but which 
we have learnt only by long practice. Each simple affirma- 
tion or judgment which has itself been acquired gradually 
and fixed mentally, becomes, by association, an accessory 
idea of, and afterwards, by closer integration, an unconscious 
element of, a more complex judgment; and so the process 
goes on in ascending complexity to the formation of a 



14 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

mental compound which means a great many simpler com- 
pounds or elements. We might compare it then to a grand 
and noble river which, when traced back to its source in a 
little rill, is seen to have grown by the successive inflows of 
many similar little streams. 

We think so much of consciousness in the functions of 
human intelligence that we do not sufficiently realise how 
much the body can do without it, but insist wrongly on 
making it essential to operations in which it has really no 
essential concern. Men do not divine truth and then work 
to it with set deliberation : they reasoned during centuries 
before they knew a single rule of logic; made instinctive 
and traditional adaptations to natural laws before general- 
ising about them; used language instinctively without 
dreaming that it was a slow elaboration through the ages, 
embodying the successive growths of intelligence ; practised 
virtue as a custom before a single rule of virtue was ever 
formulated. Indeed, had not man been virtuous before he 
found out rules of virtue he would never have been virtuous 
at all. Knowledge is instinct in life before it is under- 
standing, is in the air around before it is in the conception 
and speech ; and when in mature season the unconscious 
bursts into consciousness, the man of genius is the organ 
through which the expansion takes place ; he is the inter- 
preter of its blind impulses to the age, and gives them 
thenceforth clear utterance and definite aim. 

Such are the formidable facts which confront and con- 
tradict the metaphysical theory of freewill : compendiously 
stated, they are practical human life. For certainly the 
practical experience of the whole world from the beginning 
unto now is, that will as it works in human affairs is a power 
which does not stand outside the range of natural causation ; 
wherefore when men have formulated scientifically their 
practical philosophy, when they have set forth explicitly the 
principles that are implicit in actual life, they will be hard 
put to it to find there a suitable niche for the doctrine of an 
undetermined will. Meanwhile the advocates of the dogma 
may continue to cultivate freewill as an ideal, making of it 
a sort of holy shrine in their minds, and from time to time, 



THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AJsD ITS DIFFICULTIES. 15 

as they bethink themselves, doing it reverence ; taking good 
care the while, however, to leave it in holy seclusion, and not 
to introduce it into the affairs of daily life. 

Thus far then the dogma of freewill comes out as incon- 
sistent — first, with the fact that true doctrine is the explicit 
declaration of what is implicit in the constitution and ex- 
perience of mankind, the uprising into formal consciousness 
of that which existed tacitly below its threshold ; and, 
secondly, with the acknowledgment of the universality of 
causation within human experience. A third class of 
adverse considerations will be laid bare by a close criticism 
of certain commonly accepted but not indisputably war- 
ranted assumptions of the metaphysical method ; and it is 
with them that I go on to deal in the next section. 



SECTION II. 

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 

Let us now inquire closely what are the grounds and reasons 
of the metaphysician's clear conviction that he has a will 
and that it is free. His consciousness makes him the revela- 
tion in so plain and sure a way that all the counterargu- 
ments in the world cannot invalidate its direct and positive 
testimony. A pity it is that consciousness in this matter 
cannot swear its own interpreter. It will be well to examine 
rigorously how much it actually does tell him in respect 
of these two allegations — first, that he has a will; and, 
secondly, that it is free ; since it may be that it does not 
directly tell him all that he is in the habit of believing and 
declaring it does. 

Is it true then that we know immediately by conscious- 
ness that we have such an entity as the metaphysician 
means by will? No, it is not true; for it appears, when 
we consider the matter closely, that a great part of that 
confident dogma is not an immediate deliverance which is 
certain and cannot be disputed, but a mediate inference 



16 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

which is liable to the causes of fallacy to which all observa- 
tion and inference are liable. Consciousness tells us nothing 
whatever of a general will or an abstract will-entity ; what 
it does make known to us is a particular volition when we 
have it, the expenditure of an energy in doing or in for- 
bearing to do, and, antecedent to that energy, the possible 
choice of another course than the one adopted : an alterna- 
tive course which might be taken if it pleased us to take it, 
which has perhaps been taken in similar circumstances before, 
but which we take not now because it does not please us to 
take it ; if a lower course, because we have higher likings at 
the instant; if a higher course, because we have lower 
likings at the instant. Take notice here that the choice is 
antecedent to the energy we are conscious of as will : not 
known as a contemporaneous direct deliverance, and &o 
having the certitude of an immediate intuition ; known only 
through memory, and subject to the fallacies to which every 
act of memory, whether covering an instant or a day, is 
subject. 

Consider further what is the ' we,' the ego, the person, 
who pleases or does not please in such case to do or not to 
do. Not any abstract entity but the concrete individual ; 
not any unseen noumenon behind the phenomena, but the 
noumenon working in the phenomena; not any extremely 
sublimed and fine essence from which all substance has been 
eliminated, but a feeling, thinking and acting organism the 
whole of which works in each part, and each part in the 
whole. 'Tis c I,' compact of nerve, muscle, gland, bone, 
who choose to resolve to do or not to do on each occasion, 
not any part or detached principle or sublimed essence of 
me. From his holiest feeling and his loftiest aspiration, let 
him torture himself as he will, the most saintly person 
cannot detach the influence of the most despised organ of 
his body. The creation of an abstract will that is supposed 
to execute the particular volition and its further fashioning 
into a spiritual entity is an inference or hypothesis, not a 
direct deliverance of consciousness ; be it necessary or be it 
gratuitous, that is its undoubted character. With equal 
reason might one claim to make an abstract entity of sensa- 






WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 17 

tion, for ' I ' feel as well as will, and to maintain that tbia 
entity was necessary to produce each sensation ; or to postu- 
late a special emotional entity operating in each emotion ; 
or, going further in the same direction of entity-making, to 
create a spirit of greenness which is the cause of green things 
looking green ; or to discover a spirit of stoneness which lies 
behind the material nature of stone. In that way we might 
please ourselves to people nature with infinite multitudes of 
entities, or invisible spirits of visible things, but they would 
be superfluous in fact, as they are not apprehensible in 
thought, and of no interest save as playful essays of imagi- 
nation always eager and pleased to exercise its energy. For 
it is noteworthy that the imagination needs no spur in order 
to work ; unlike the reason, whose exercise costs the pain of 
effort, its function is too eager and easy, the hard matter 
being to hold it in and discipline it. That is the reason 
why it is so much easier to lie than to speak the truth : no 
training is required to learn to lie, but the sternnest mental 
discipline is necessary to implant a habit of strict truth in 
thought and word and deed, and will not succeed then if the 
foundations are faulty. 

What the metaphysician has done is plain enough : he 
has converted into an entity the general term which embraces 
the multitude of particular volitions, themselves varying 
infinitely in power and quality, and has then referred them 
all to it as cause. So he talks habitually as if will had 
always the same nature, whereas there is no such thing as 
one and the same will-nature; each will having its own 
nature and development, being itself an independent reality. 
With the disposition, powers, and habits of each mind as 
different as the constitution, temper and activity of each 
body, and with the several variations of temper in each body 
at different times, how can the will fail to be different ? Like 
it may be in different persons, and on different occasions in 
the same person, but it is never identical ; it is always in- 
dividual, particular. A general will is not an entity, it is 
no more than a notion. No wonder that there is neither 
common end nor end to philosophical disquisitions concerning 
a notion of which each person is free to have his own notion. 



18 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

If now it be admitted that in the common will-theory we 
have to do with an inference not with a direct deliverance 
of consciousness, the claim next put forward will be that it 
is a necessary inference, because there must be some basis of 
continuity, some bond of unity, between particular volitions, 
between the will of today and the will of yesterday. Some 
constant essence with sense of continuity and unity, some- 
thing which is one behind the separate volitions, is a 
necessary postulate of thought ; and it is inconceivable that 
matter can furnish such a basis of unity. The ego would be 
the sport of impressions, they say, if it had not a free power 
over them to hold and to reject, to associate and to separate ; 
not otherwise, I suppose, than as in chemistry, were there 
no free chemical ego, definite separations and combinations 
could not take place — one element not leave one compound 
to join another, unless it were guided by that internal spon- 
taneity. 

Those who talk in that way think of matter as inert 
and inanimate ; they fail to realise, first, that matter is not 
inert, there being in the simplest molecule the complexity 
of movement of the entire solar system; and, secondly, 
they lack the conception of the most complex matter and its 
manifold energies individuated as a living organism, and 
what that conception implies. 

Now, in regard of the common conception of matter, it 
is plainly that of something gross and tangible, inert and 
subject to gravitation ; and naturally so gross a conception 
of it is utterly inconsistent with any possible conception 
of the matter of mind. Because we cannot conceive a 
millstone having anything to do with mind, we protest 
that mind has nothing whatever to do with any sort of 
matter. 1 But chemical atoms, which we have the best 

1 It is certain that from all the millstones in the world heaped together we 
could not derive mind, nor from all the inorganic bodies in the world, nor 
from all the organic substances other than the most complex organic develop- 
ment of matter in the highest nervous system ; but does it therefore follow 
that we could not get it from this last ? Are not the energies of organic 
matter as different as its qualities 1 And what is the special energy of the 
most complex organisation of the highest nervous system, if it be not mental 1 
Those who protest that it is not mental should at least tell us what it is. 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEKNING WILL. 19 

reason to believe are not, like geometrical points, pure 
abstractions but realities, are exceedingly active, notwith- 
standing- that they are invisible, intangible, inappreciable 
by sense of any kind, actually suprasensual — spiritualised 
matter, so to speak : though we might say of them, in 
Jeremy Taylor's words, that they cannot trouble the eye 
nor vex the tenderest part of a wound, yet it is by their 
union in infinite numbers that they form dimensions and 
constitute the gross matter of the world that our senses 
take cognisance of. Manifestly then the first necessity is 
a just conception of the infinitely subtile activities of the 
infinitely minute atoms of matter. 

Next, in regard of the conception of an organism, it is 
necessary to apprehend and realise that it is a physiological 
union of various tissues and diverse organs, each tissue, 
and much more each organ, itself infinitely complex, so 
bound together in structure and function, and so unified 
by suitable co-ordinating mechanism, that the part every- 
where works in the whole, and the whole in every part; 
nowhere else in nature are diversities and integration of 
diversities carried to such a height ; nowhere is the realisa- 
tion of complete unity in manifold diversity more signal. 
Since Bichat's time, who first directed and enforced attention 
to the properties of the particular tissues, showing that the 
life of the organism was the sum of the lives of their indi- 
vidual elements, we have learnt to know that the unity of 
organism does not mean a mysterious vital entity, of quite 
special and superior nature, non-material, hidden in the 
secret centre of things, and holding the parts together by a 
powerful spiritual grip, but that it is the expression of the 
complete consensus or harmony of the many and divers parts 
arranged in that organic form. Apart from all question of 
mental unity, there can be no question of the existence of a 
sufficient bodily unity. 

There is in regard to the bodily organism a further 
consideration which is not alwa}~s adequately realised — 
namely, that it is a self-adjusting and self-registering struc- 
ture ; the modifications which it undergoes through exercise 
passing not away without after-effects in it, but being 



20 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

embodied in the structure and made part of its nature, so 
that they enter into its life and function ever afterwards. Its 
life-principle is indeed a principle of continuity : in the 
living present the incorporate past is active. The organic 
registration affords an instructive instance of the opera- 
tion of the law of conservation of energy in the fashioning 
of will ; for we perceive that in an act of will, which 
always renders a next like act of will easier, not all the 
energy is expended in the outward effects that it accom- 
plishes, but some of it goes to lay in structure the foundation 
of future will. So it is that will remembers and learns to 
will, exercise building up faculty, and conduct character; 
and that it becomes, according to its training, either the 
calm agent of strength, or the shifty accomplice of weakness. 

It is in this organic registration, too, that we discover 
the physical basis of all memory. Memory being the recur- 
rence of a mental state means physiologically the same part 
of brain in activity as on the former occasion. But that 
is not all, since there is in addition to the recurrence the 
consciousness that it is a recurrence — a reminiscence : it 
might recur without such consciousness, as it does in certain 
morbid states sometimes, and it would not then be mental 
memory. Now the physiological considerations that bear 
upon this recurrence are these : — first, the before-mentioned 
organic after-effect of the first function whereby it occurs 
the second time more easily; secondly, that although the 
same part of the brain is in action as before, it is the same 
part with the difference that it has been in action before, 
and has ingrained record thereof; wherefore the declaration 
which this after-effect makes of itself in consciousness must 
be something added to the first consciousness — that is to 
say, will be the consciousness of the recurrence ; thirdly, 
that in every part and function of the organism the whole 
works consentient, and that such fundamental unity cannot 
fail to make, as all bodily states do, some sort of declaration 
of itself in consciousness. And if that declaration be not 
an intuition of the ego, what is it ? 

Having this individual unity and continuity of physio- 
logical organism, it will not be amiss to ask whether we 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEKNINO WILL. 21 

have not in it the sufficient basis of the unity and continuity 
of volition, the real and constant foundation of the conscious- 
ness of the ego. Impossible, says the metaphysician; a con- 
sciousness one and continuous through all differences and 
successions of states, not a totality of so many separate 
consciousnesses — that is what I cannot conceive as the 
subjective aspect of the unity of organism. But why not, 
if the organism be, as it plainly is, one and continuous, and 
be not, as it plainly is not, so many separate elements, any. 
one of which can have life at all apart from it ? Let us try 
to understand the why not, which is this or something like 
it : the organic unity, being of material breeding, is not 
self -known (a plain assumption of the whole question), does 
not make itself known within, is known only from without 
by observation of sense ; but inasmuch as a unity is known 
from within, which it is impossible should be the unity that 
is known by observation, the conclusion is inevitable that it 
must be the unity of an internal something, an immaterial 
ego. It is a purely internal intuition of unity, and although 
there is a corresponding external unity manifest enough to 
others, that has nothing whatever to do with it. We are 
required to reject the real unity which we perceive and 
know, and which others perceive and know, and to create 
another unity to run parallel with it, in order to keep 
rigorously separate the domains of subjective and objective 
observation ; not minding the while to consider adequately 
how that any present phenomenon of self-consciousness is 
possible only by reason of past states of consciousness that 
were excited objectively and have been wrought, so to speak, 
into the structure of the mental organisation. Why not, it 
is natural to ask, a unity not of mind separately nor of body 
separately, but of mind and body, known by the two ways 
of internal and external observation ? Why not, indeed, find 
here, as we well might, the concurrence of extension and 
thought, of body and mind ? 

Considering that it is not good philosophy to multiply 
causes needlessly and to invent secret powers to do that 
which there is an obvious and sufficient power at hand to 
do, it is clearly our duty to find out what the body can do 



22 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

by itself in the way of maintaining unity and continuity, 
without help of an imposed intangible entity which may 
after all be superfluous. At any rate, until the body's in- 
competency has been plainly demonstrated by a rigorous 
and exhaustive preliminary inquiry into its powers, and the 
necessity of a cause of an entirely new order so proved 
indisputably, the hypothesis of a will-entity to supplement 
its deficiencies cannot be accepted as a necessary inference. 
Eather may we call it the introduction of a cataclysm 
by way of explanation, and compare it to the catastrophic 
explanations that used at one time to be fashionable in 
geology. That being so, the analysis of the so-called direct 
and positive testimony as to the existence of a will-entity 
has brought us to these two results — first, that the testi- 
mony is not an immediate deliverance, but a mediate 
inference ; and, secondly, that the inference is not a neces- 
sary inference, since another theory capable of accounting 
for the facts is possible and ready at hand. 

If an intruder of an inquiring turn of mind, unawed by 
the conventional assumptions of metaphysics, were to venture 
into that province of thought, fixed in resolve to question 
freely and think sincerely, he might perhaps be tempted to 
call in question the absolute value of that intuition of unity 
which self-consciousness yields, and to dispute whether it 
does bring us into so immediate and certain a relation with 
the noumenal ego as is assumed. From the high meta- 
physical standpoint he might well argue that we never can 
know the self-in-itself ; that pure abstract noumenal mind is 
as unknowable as pure abstract matter ; that the only know- 
able is mind in a state of determination, that is, in a par- 
ticular state ; that the highest intuition of self-consciousness, 
having that character, has therefore no more authority than 
any other phenomenal manifestation. Moreover, from the 
same standpoint he might go on to make this reflection : 
that the consciousness of unity and continuity is after all no 
more than a condition or form of thought, a category under 
which we, by our infirmities or limitations, are bound to 
think, just as we are bound to think under the forms of 
time and space. I perceive and think the world under the 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 23 

conditions of my senses and faculties, which conditions are 
the forms of time and space ; and thereupon I say that the 
external world exists in time and space, making of time and 
space sorts of realities. They are really not existences of 
that kind ; they are relations of two terms — the self and the 
not-self. We have behaved in a like manner with regard to 
continuity and unity, playing upon ourselves the trick of 
transforming a form or condition of self-consciousness into 
a direct intuition into the self-in-itself, and so into an 
absolute revelation of the unity of pure mind. 

It might be hard to see an end to the inquiry were we 
once to set diligently to work to examine and to set forth 
how much innocent dupery we habitually practise upon 
ourselves in the region of metaphysics. Being compelled 
in so attenuated an atmosphere to make violent exertions 
in order to sustain a flight at all, we imagine that we are 
making a great advance when we are whirling in a circle, or 
are little better than stationary. The term consciousness is 
by no means free from misleading vagueness and obscurity 
of application ; it being a common practice to speak of states 
of consciousness, as if consciousness had its states, were 
really an entity behind the states and had existence apart 
from them, when it is itself only a state of something else, 
whether that something be soul or body ; not otherwise in 
fact than as it is the practice to speak of the will exercising 
its several wills, whereas it is the man who wills and there 
is no general will apart from the particular will. There is 
no such existence as a general or abstract consciousness in 
the individual ; it is as imaginary a noumenon as abstract 
will or abstract force ; there are so many particular con- 
sciousnesses ; a general consciousness is merely a notion. 
Indeed, if there be one thing in the world which is particular 
to the individual, a special quality of his which he has no 
better warrant to abstract from his personality and to make 
absolute than his individual temper or individual gait, it 
is consciousness. We are entirely ignorant what are the 
physical conditions of consciousness, which nevertheless we 
must admit to exist wherever mind works by brain. Obeying 
the necessity of having some physical hypothesis, we may 



24 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

suppose — and one supposition will answer our purpose as 
well as another where any hypothesis wants positive base — 
that each thought has, whether on the same side or in the 
opposite half of the brain, its reflecting centre — that is to say, 
a correspondent or consentient centre in which it is instantly 
repeated or reflected with more or less completeness and 
exactness ; such reflection of it being the condition of con- 
sciousness. What a gross absurdity it is at once seen to be 
to find in the particular consciousness anything that trans- 
cends its antecedents, anything supra-individual, anything 
universal or absolutej 

Resisting these easily made digressions, which at every 
turn tempt us to leave the main track of the argument, let 
us now examine critically the second positive declaration 
concerning will which consciousness is said to make — that 
which is interpreted to mean that the will is free. Is 
consciousness as clear and competent a witness as it is 
thought to be ? One thing is plain at the outset : that it 
only illumines directly the mental state of the moment, 
revealing nothing of the long train of antecedent states of 
which the present state is the outcome ; all is dark beyond 
where its light immediately falls, and it cannot testify any- 
thing concerning what is going on outside the range of its 
illumination, any more than a person in the light can testify 
concerning what is taking place silently near him in the 
dark. As a great ocean wave might be supposed to rise so 
high as to catch on its crest the glow of the rising or of the 
setting sun, while the waves around remained below the 
level of illumination, so a mental state rises above the 
threshold of consciousness as the outcome of the energies of 
multitudes of more or less active states that remain below 
the threshold. Consciousness makes known the actual 
choice or volition, but does not make known the pre-existent 
order of events : it does not reveal what has taken place 
and is taking place in the unillumined region: it is the 
self-revelation of the moment and no more. But how in- 
finitely small is that revelation compared with what we 
learn by observation and experience of self and of others and 
by the history of human doings in all times and in all places, 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 25 

needs not to be pointed out. The one is the coruscating point 
of a moment, the other embraces length of time and extent of 
space. As the testimony of consciousness moreover is imme- 
diate, that is to say, is strictly the expression of its present 
state, it cannot by the nature of the case have direct regard 
to any former state of consciousness ; otherwise we should 
have to admit that a present state of consciousness could be 
itself and a former state of consciousness at the same 
instant. If it steps beyond the instant, we have no longer 
to do with the direct deliverance of itself, but with the 
indirect evidence of memory of antecedent consciousness, 
not with introspective certainty but with retrospective 
fallacy ; staying in the instant, how can it help falling into 
the illusion of an undetermined will ? 

This last reflection, if followed out to its logical upshot, 
will be found to reach far, since it implies that a present 
state of consciousness has not, qua consciousness, real con- 
tinuity with the consciousness of yesterday or of a year ago, 
or of thirty years ago. The continuity is not a continuity of 
consciousness but a continuity of memory, the basis of which 
is not consciousness but organic registration. Now inasmuch 
as the self of today is very different from the self of thirty 
years since, and as moreover the quality of the present state 
of consciousness, even when it is a recollection, connotes and 
witnesses to the present self, it clearly is not the conscious- 
ness proper to the then self; that it is impossible to revive; 
you might as well demand of an adult that he should retread 
the infantile steps which he made in learning to walk. The 
sober truth is that there is no abstract consciousness with 
the intuition of identity, no actual unity of consciousness ; 
there are so many particular consciousnesses, and the thread 
of continuity running through them is not a conscious thread 
but a continuity in that which lies beneath consciousness. 
We should be in a bad way if we were compelled to base the 
certainty of identity on consciousness alone. 

Before assenting to its testimony concerning an unde- 
termined will as final and sufficient, it behoves us to inquire 
and consider well what has been going on in the unillumined 
region. Now whoever will be at the pains to carry his 
3 



26 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

volitional self- inspection patiently back from the present 
state of consciousness to that state which went before it, 
and from that again to its antecedent state, and so back- 
wards along the train of activity which has issued in the 
latest conscious outcome, lighting up in succession as well 
as he can each link in the intricate nexus of man} r -junctioned 
associations, may easily convince himself that he would not 
have a present state of volition were it not for past states of 
volition. Whatever be the nature of will, it is certainly as 
impotent to will without previous acts of will as a child is to 
talk and walk which has never learnt its words and steps. 
In order to have liberty of will it is necessary to have not 
only the absence of constraint so that it may act freely, but 
the presence of capacity or power so that it may act at all ; 
it is of no use being free to read Homer if one does not 
understand a word of Greek, or to play on the fiddle if one 
cannot distinguish one note of music from another. The 
present volition contains the abstracts of many former voli- 
tions by which it has been, literally speaking, informed. 

No one who reflects adequately on the matter will deny 
or seriously dispute that an individual's thinking, feeling, and 
acting as he does at any moment of his life is the outcome 
of his nature and training, the expression of his character ; 
that his present being is the organic development of his past 
being, the issue of a pre-existent order ; that he is linked in 
a chain of causation which renders it impossible he should 
ever transcend himself. It is a chain, too, which a little 
reflection will prove to reach an indefinitely long way back 
in an ancestral past. As it is evident enough that a person 
inherits a father's, grandfather's, or more remote ancestor's 
tricks of manner, of speech, of walk, of handwriting, of 
gesture and the like, it may be without the least imitation 
on his part, since the father or grandfather was perhaps dead 
before he was born, so it is not less evident that he inherits 
modes of thought and feeling and will which, being charac- 
teristic of him individually, seem to those who are familiar 
with him to be essentially spontaneous, especially his own. 
In the internal parts of the body, as in its external con- 
figuration, and especially in the supreme structure of the 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 27 

brain in which all parts, internal and external, have repre- 
sentation, direct or indirect, there are lines of ancestral 
resemblance which condition his modes of thinking, feeling, 
and will — all his modes of consciousness. When he has had 
the inspiration to do well in some sudden and urgent 
emergency of life, in which he hardly knew at the time what 
he did, he might justly give thanks to the dead father or 
grandfather who endowed him with the actuating impulse 
or the happy aptitude which served him so well on the 
critical occasion. Thou didst not behave like a fool in that 
overwhelming emergency? Claim no merit thyself in the 
matter, but render deep and silent thanks to the giver. The 
circumstances of the particular crisis, the bodily change 
incident to an epoch of life, the novel stimulus of a fever or 
other bodily disease, or some occult cause of which we can 
give no account, will kindle into activity an ancestral quality 
that had been latent till then, unnoticed and perhaps un- 
suspected. What man is there who does not, in his manner 
of making love to his mistress, show some trait of character 
and behaviour which he never noticed in himself before, but 
which he might perhaps have noticed in his father had he 
been present at his father's wooing. 

It must seem strange to those who view mind from a 
pure psychological standpoint that such ancestral aptitudes 
should exist in it for a long time in a perfectly silent or 
latent state, without the least consciousness on its part of 
their existence, and start suddenly into activity on the occa- 
sion of some unforeseen stimulus. Where are they during 
all that time of latency ? If in the mind, how is it that the 
mind does not comprehend its own contents ? It will not 
help to say that they are in the memory, for how can the 
memory contain that which, never having been personally 
known, has never been put into it ? Is it that we must 
admit unconscious mind ; and if so, what is its relation, on 
the one hand, to conscious mind, and, on the other, to the 
physical organisation of mind ? Is brain, after all, uncon- 
scious mind? The fact, however, is quite consistent with 
the experience of one who is hugely pleased with some 
brilliant conception or expression that occurs to him, and 



I 



'? 



28 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

which he believes to be entirely original, when the real truth 
is that he met with it in some author years before, stored it 
unawares in a reqess of his mind, and now brings it forth in 
all the freshness of novelty as a new birth of thought. He 
meanwhile, happy parent, cackles over it with delight, like 
a hen that has just laid its egg, or is as proud and pleased 
as a woman who has just accomplished the nowise original 
or uncommon business of bringing a child into the world. 
Such the naive joy of production everywhere in nature ! 

Here, then, is another instance of mental being that is 
ignorant of its being ; an instance not easy to explain on the 
pure spiritual theory of mind. It is plain proof at any rate 
of the incompetence of self-consciousness to perform a com- 
plete mental self-inspection. Nor would it be right to \ V) 
ignore such unconscious mental being on the ground of an 
assumed non-intervention of it in conscious life, seeing that, 
though latent, it is not entirely passive ; for besides its deep, 
silent, but effective work in moulding the mental nature, and 
weighting the expression of it in speech and conduct, im- 
pulses from its depths spring into consciousness unawares 
oftentimes, we know not how or why. Now and then in 
everybody's life it happens that an unforeseen impulse 
starting forth from the unconscious depths of his being 
drives him to say or do what he had not the least intention 
to say or do a moment beforehand, or in like manner with- 
holds him from doing what he had full reasons and motives 
to do. It is not improbable that the singular dsemon of 
Socrates was an impulse of that nature, unmotived in con- 
sciousness but not so in the character ; a kind of inspiration 
apt naturally to spring up in a richly endowed, much-medita- 
tive mind that was habitually exercised in observation and 
reflection. So also may it have been with those fine ideas or 
intuitions of Plato, which came into his mind in so unforeseen 
and startling a way that he imagined them to be reminis- 
cences of a former higher existence. How is it that when 
two persons give the same opinion or counsel in almost the 
same words in the same circumstances the effect is some- 
times so different? Is it not because there is the weight 
of character behind speech, the depth of inarticulate nature 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEKNING WILL. 29 

beneath the partial and inadequate art of expression ? The 
total energy in each case is, if I may so express myself, the 
sum of the potential and kinetic energies of the individual. 
A great character, like a great work of art, moves men not 
so much by that which he expresses as by what that which 
he expresses suggests. It is a very poor definition, then, of 
the ego to make it, as some do, the sum of agreeable or 
painful sensations, actual or ideal, which determine the con- 
duct ; when there is not a state of consciousness, as known to 
self or as revealed through its proper channels to others, 
that has not the whole character, mental and bodily, 
beneath it. 

When we reflect how much time and what a multitude of 
divers experiences have gone to the formation of a character, 
what a complex product it is, and what an inconceivably in- 
tricate inter- working of intimate energies, active and inhi- 
bitive, any display of it in feeling and will means, it must 
appear a gross absurdity for any one to aspire to estimate 
and appraise all the component motives of a particular act 
of will. Its sources are too remote and hidden, the paths 
of motives are too fine, intricate, circuitous and various, to 
admit a complete analysis of its constituent parts : the keen- 
est self-inspection in the world can never make them plain, 
since it is not possible to seize and measure each minute and 
remote operative thrill of energy, to bring all the coefficient 
factors into the light of consciousness. As well think to fix 
and measure the force of every little wave that goes to swell 
the great tidal wave that dashes finally upon the shore, or — a 
less complex but perhaps juster comparison — to measure the 
numerous and exquisitely fine and delicate thrills of motion 
that make the varying modulations of the human voice. 
To dissect any act of will accurately, and then to recom- 
pose it, would be to dissect and recompose humanity. Acts 
of will being acts and manifestations of self, outcomes of 
the person's essential nature, a thorough self-knowledge is 
now, as it ever has been, an unattainable aim of knowledge. 
To affirm that will is ever undetermined is then to postulate 
an omniscience of self in face of the certitude that not one- 
self only but every self is inscrutably complex. Nevertheless, 



30 WILL m ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

the philosophers who refuse to acknowledge the incompe- 
tence of self-consciousness must continue to do it. 

It is in the natural order of the development of the 
mental organisation, indeed a daily experience of it, that 
energy becomes element, so to speak, the conscious motives 
of past years being thus incorporated structurally as un- 
conscious factors in the motives of today: there is the 
materialisation of motives as the basis of future function, 
the structuralisation of simple function as the step of an 
advance to a higher function. We can no more bring back 
the motives to consciousness in their primitive characters 
than we can bring back the life-function of a leaf which is 
embodied in the structure of the branch on which it grew ; 
or than we can, in our instantaneous visual judgments of 
size, distance and the like, rehearse in full detail the slow 
and tedious steps, now incorporate in structure as habit or 
instinct, by which they were originally acquired. 

The progress of intellectual growth is a progress from 
the concrete and simple to the general and abstract — from 
the feeling to the image, from the image to the idea, from 
the simple idea to the complex idea, from complex ideas 
to abstract conceptions ; thereupon the general or abstract 
term becomes the sign of a class of perceptions or concep- 
tions, is used as a convenient representative unit or sub- 
stitute for them, like an algebraic symbol, and functions as 
such in subsequent mental operations; and this substitu- 
tion of substitutes in ascending abstractions goes on as far 
as our minds are able to go in that direction. One may 
easily imagine, as correspondent on the physical side, so many 
superimposed layers of cerebral structure successively or- 
ganised in function, higher centres being brought into play 
to co-ordinate lower centres — superordinate to them subordi- 
nate — and the whole together forming the mental organisation 
or the texture of mind, so to speak. When we wish to know 
the true meaning of the abstract, to test rigorously what it 
actually represents, we must always go back to the concrete ; 
and when we do that we find that in the last resort it repre- 
sents the mode of affection of an individual by an object or 
a class of objects and his special mode of reaction to the 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 31 

object. That is his apprehension of it, which apprehension 
or mental grasping, be it noted, includes movement as a con- 
stituent element ; is not, as commonly implied, receptive only, 
but is also reactive — a bi-polar event, sensory and motor. 

Little as we think of it, the discriminations of sense, 
whether of sight or of touch or of any other sense, imply 
movements of muscles, without which they would be impos- 
sible ; all the impressions which it is capable of receiving 
might be made on each sense without any discriminative 
perceptions on its part, in the absence of the proper motor 
adaptations by the muscles connected with its organ. Indeed, 
without muscular action it may be questioned whether we 
should feel at all. In the first instance, the impression upon 
the sense produces a disturbance of equilibrium which dis- 
charges itself in vague motor reactions on the external world ; 
but these motor reactions become by degrees special and 
adaptive. Now mental development in man does not stay at 
this sensori-motor level ; for the adaptive reactions are duly 
represented or registered in the higher centres of the brain, 
and thereafter are not expressed externally in visible move- 
ments, but take place internally in their cerebral representa- 
tions, such internal operations being what we call perceptions 
or ideas. Thus ideas signify fundamentally adaptive reactions 
at one remove ; complex ideas combinations of such repre- 
sentative reactions ; and abstract ideas cerebral representa- 
tions at still higher removes. The understanding of an 
abstract term, or each operation of our highest reason, im- 
plies then a deep fund of slow acquisition by culture and 
exercise, not fundamentally different from, though vastly 
more delicate and complex than, the faculty of performing 
some skilful bodily movement which has been gained by 
diligent practice : as impossible to the undeveloped and feeble 
intelligence of a low savage as the cleverest feat of a juggler 
is to an untrained child. The commonest operations of in- 
telligence postulate a succession of functions that have been 
capitalised in structure as faculty. 

A very rich fund of faculty is of necessity presupposed 
when will is influenced by reason in the moral sphere, and so 
acts in its highest capacity; for the supreme reason which 



32 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

then inspires it is not any simple, pure, spiritual entity that 
requires no support in experience, but it is the highest and 
most refined outcome of enlightened experience ; something 
which comes not miraculously into a man but grows in him 
by consummate development from the not supreme, and is no 
more possible without it than the flower is possible without 
the plant. To know the real value in sterling coin of the fine 
theoretical talk about the declarations of supreme reason one 
must bring them in the last resort to the test of practical 
application. And it is the same with moral principles : the 
difficulty in morals has never been the enunciation of lofty 
general principles, but the application of the principle to the 
particular case ; and the eternal barrenness of books about 
ethics is that they may give us no code of exact rules to 
help at this practical juncture. Even Kant, sad to say, 
sends us to common utilitarian standards for the practical 
uses of his grand categorical imperative. 

To search adequately into the unillumined region of a 
person's character, in order to find out the motives of his 
conduct on every occasion, would manifestly necessitate the 
complete unravelling of his mental development, if it did not 
compel us to undertake, in historical retrospect, an analytical 
disintegration of the mental development of the race from its 
beginning. But a very cursory inspection of any one's 
behaviour suffices to show that there are many energies at 
work below the threshold of consciousness, whenever an 
energy rises above it as a conscious state. Hence come the 
gross and ludicrous illusions into which men oftentimes fall 
with regard to their motives on particular occasions, the subtile 
ways in which they innocently dupe themselves, the signal 
self-deceptions of which they are sincerely capable. An 
actively conscious state attracts to itself reinforcing energies 
of consonant vibrations from the infraconscious depths of 
the character, grouping around it the ideas and feelings that 
are of a sympathetic nature, and thus, once cherished, 
obtains an abundance of congenial support, and easily feels 
itself amply justified. 

A person is persuaded that he has acted in full freedom 
of will from certain high motives of which he was conscious, 



WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL 33 

when these, after all, were not the real motives that actuated 
him, and when even a wayfaring man, though a fool, may 
perceive plainly that they were not. How is it that friends 
of humanity are often the enemies of their homes, and that 
undetected wife-poisoners make zealous professional philan- 
thropists ? I am not sure whether one person who lived in 
the society of another for a month, in circumstances fitted 
to strain and test his qualities, though he might not be a 
particularly acute observer himself, would not know more of 
the other's real character than the latter would know of it 
himself after years of toilsome introspection and scrupulous 
self-analysis. Certainly we may get a truer explanation 
sometimes of a person's conduct on a particular occasion by 
a knowledge of the characters of his near relations than by 
his exposition of his motives or one's own divination of 
them ; for in the traits of their character we may see in full 
development, written out, as it were, in plain characters, that 
which is potential mainly and of occasional outcome in him. 
'Tis a philosophic use to make of relations to use them to 
teach self-knowledge. 

When acts appear to be incommensurate with motives, 
as they sometimes do, or when the same motive appears to 
produce different acts, the just conclusion is not that an 
arbitrary power has intervened capriciously and upset 
calculation ; but that the motives which show themselves 
in the light of reflection are only a part of the complex 
causation, and that the most important part thereof lies 
in the dark. When the same motive acts differently in 
different persons or in the same person at different times — 
when, for example, one sacrifices wealth, repose, reputation, 
even life itself, for a motive which scarce touches another ; 
or when one man is moved to the depths of his being by the 
glance of a woman which has no more effect upon another, 
or perhaps upon himself at another time, than upon a statue 
of marble — it is ridiculous to speak of the motive being the 
same : the so-called motive is hardly more than the occasion 
of the unloosing of the real intimate motives that are 
immanent in the structure of the character. If the ego 
represents the consensus of the several parts of the organism, 



34 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

it is plain that disorder of any part will affect directly the 
consensus, and so indirectly the disposition of the ego, which 
must needs thereupon react differently to a stimulus from 
what it would have done had its temper not been so modified. 
A face that provokes instant aversion in one person may 
stir as instant a liking in another, because its features are 
signs that appeal by a subtile eloquence to antipathic or 
sympathetic qualities in the beholder's nature ; the like- 
kindedness or unlike-kindedness of nature being itself 
perhaps the result of the embodiment of intimate ancestral 
relations between persons of similar character and phy- 
siognomy. Would you learn best what a person's motives 
have been, what is the real worth of the freedom of will 
that he has enjoyed, study the history of his life ; that is 
his character, and there you will find the unequivocal record 
of what he has willed. 

It is of the first importance, when discussing the de- 
termination of will by motive, to apprehend clearly that 
motive and cause are not the same things, and to take diligent 
heed not to confound them. The motive may be little, 
seemingly quite trifling, and the effect something vastly out 
of proportion to it, for the motive is the slight touch which 
liberates the pent-up forces, the sum of which and of 
conscious motives together constitutes the cause. That a 
little thing will produce a great effect when the mechanism 
is accurately framed and fitted to respond to it, we know as 
well by the easy starting of a locomotive as by the violent 
sneezing which a grain of snuff in the nostril will occasion ; 
when cutting or tearing the mucous membrane of it would 
have no such effect. In like manner, by touching a button 
with the little finger, or by giving a sharp tap to a piece of 
dynamite, one might, if suitable preparations had been made 
beforehand, blow a thousand persons into eternity. The 
touch or tap may be the motive, but is not the efficient cause 
in that case ; it is the initial step of a series of events which 
issue in the explosion. Things being disposed exactly as 
they were in a complex sequence, the result was a necessity ; 
but a very trivial intervention, disarranging the order of the 
nicely adjusted antecedents, would have sufficed to prevent 






WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 35 

the explosion. So in some sort it is with will, which in 
every case is a most complex involution of energies; the 
motive which occasions the discharge is not the cause, it is 
one of the many co-operating conditions the sum of which is 
cause. On what seemingly trivial things — the purest hazard 
or the meanest incident — have the great movements of the 
world sometimes hinged? Had Cleopatra's nose been a little 
shorter, says Pascal, the whole face of the earth would have 
been changed. 

What an awful and overwhelming reflection this of the 
momentous issue of trifling motive, when made in refer- 
ence to individual life, if one really possessed freewill! A 
minute omission, a trivial commission at a critical juncture, 
which a little sharper foresight or a little more resolution 
might have avoided, has turned the whole current of a life. 
One would be driven to take refuge in fatality in order to 
escape a crushing weight of despair, if a single wrong choice, 
an accidental inclination this way or that, could have such 
momentous issues, so awful the responsibility otherwise. Be 
comforted : you are at the mercy of no such accidents ; the 
trivial incident was but the occasion of the internal explo- 
sion, so to speak, and without it or under the impact of 
some other equally light motive the individual nature would 
have declared itself and had its way. The will is not deter- 
mined by motive but by cause — that is to say, by the sum 
of conditions, passive and active, on which the event follows ; 
in other words, it has as antecedents, not only the motives 
of which we are conscious, but the motive energies that are 
active below the threshold of consciousness. 

It is easy to see how, in the absence of any knowledge of 
these infraconscious energies, men might fall into the opinion 
of a freewill; for when the will acted without apparent 
motives, and more particularly when its action was not in 
accord with the apparently prevailing motives, it was the 
most natural thing in the world to ascribe the impulse to 
caprice, freedom, something self-determining in it. Behold- 
ing with surprise the very different volitions of the same 
person in the same circumstances, and reflecting on the 
similar experiences of self — a seeming identity of antecedents 



36 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

with a manifest diversity of consequents — it was an obvious 
question how the individual could form so different a judg- 
ment and exercise so different a will were the will not free. 
The answer of course is that he was not the same person 
and had not the same will ; any more than he is the same 
person and has the same will at puberty as in childhood, in 
manhood as at puberty, in old age as in manhood, in the 
hour of death as on the day of his marriage. Here, too, 
comes plainly out the justice of the argument on which 
stress has been laid by sober-minded writers on philosophy 
— that tbe right and proper opposite of necessary is not/ree, 
but fortuitous or contingent ; the contingency or chance 
lying not in the absence of determination but in the presence 
of unknown determinants. 

At this point, then, I hope to have said enough to estab- 
lish my second proposition, and, having first proved to the 
metaphysician that consciousness does not tell him that he 
has such a will as he imagines, to have now proved that it 
has not the authority to tell him that his will is undeter- 
mined. He has based upon its declaration a superstructure 
which it is unable to bear. Be the doctrine of an undeter- 
mined entity true or not, consciousness is not competent to 
decide the question by an immediate intuition. It will not 
be amiss to go on now to make a further examination of the 
nature and conditions of the authority of consciousness. 



SECTION III. 

CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OP CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Is there not large assumption, and perhaps a good deal 
of fallacy in the large assumption, made on behalf of the 
authority of its self-intuitions ? Let the inquiry be sincere 
and searching, and it will disclose reasons to suspect some- 
thing illusory in the assertion that the knowledge of mental 
states through self-consciousness is more certain and positive, 
because more immediate, than the knowledge of external 



CONCERNING THE AUTHOKITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 37 

objects through the senses. The latter knowledge is after 
all just as immediate in itself, since it consists actually of 
states of consciousness. 

When I perceive an object it manifestly is not the 
object that is known to me directly, but the state of con- 
sciousness : the odour is not in the rose, but in the rose- 
smeller ; the colour is not in the flower, but in the flower- 
seer ; the harmony of fine sound is not in the instrument, 
but in the sensibilities of him who hears it, existing not 
for him who has no ear for music : the external conditions of 
colour, odour and sound are not in the least like the 
sensations which they excite. Whatever it be mediate of, 
however, the state of consciousness is itself immediate. 
In like manner, the knowledge of those states of conscious- 
ness which are described as immediate — the Descartian 
cogito, for example, which is to convince me that I am — is 
without doubt immediate in itself, but it is none the less 
mediate of something of which it is an affection ; and 
this something, if we suppose it to be a mental self, is far 
more difficult to know in itself than the external object, 
being no more than it within the compass of introspective 
intuition, and, unlike it, not being within the compass of 
objective observation. A state of consciousness that is at 
all definite, whether of internal or external origin, cannot 
certainly be either the subjective or the objective thing in 
itself: it is a relation of self and not-self, and implicates 
the one as necessarily as the other term. Cogito, ergo sum, 
6 1 think, therefore I am/ has a ring of transcendental author- 
ity, until we interpolate after ' I ' the quietly suppressed but 
none the less surreptitiously understood ' who am,' and let 
it read, as it should read, thus — ' I [who am] think, there- 
fore I am ; ' after which it does not appear to carry us 
beyond the simple and subjectively irreducible fact of con- 
sciousness, beneath which, it must not be forgotten, there is 
in all cases the more fundamental fact of an organism that 
is one. 

To assert that the feeling of which we have direct ex- 
perience is not bodily but mental, is to make two statements 
which are not self-evident, and which certainly cannot be 



38 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

proved ; for, in the first place, we have no means of knowing 
that it is not bodily, since it has never yet been shown, 
though it is freely assumed, that consciousness is not the 
function of a particular bodily structure ; and, in the second 
place, we have no means of knowing that it is mental, or at 
any rate we do not know that in affirming it to be mental we 
mean anything more than that it is sui generis — that is to 
say, an experience distinctly different from that which we get 
by any other channel of knowledge of what bodily function is. 
Mental in that sense, and special in any sense, it certainly 
is, but the question really is whether the special result be 
due to the special channel through which the information 
comes, or to the existence of a special entity ; to our mode 
of apprehension, or to the secret presence, in the back- 
ground, of a substance which is not substance, being insub- 
stantial — immaterial substance. Here, again, we strike 
upon one of those expressions that seem to common appre- 
hension to be a contradiction in terms and a mode of robbing 
language of definite meaning, but which the mystical sense 
of high philosophy perceives to be a conjunction of opposites 
that bespeaks a deeper unity. 

We may acknowledge readily that the direct experience 
of consciousness is quite unlike our experience of any other 
bodily function, and ought to be described in different 
language, but it follows not therefrom that it is not bodily 
experience. Metaphysics will remain in any event a special 
study; not perhaps as the study by a physical being of 
something that has no essential relation to physics, since 
physics plainly lies beneath psychics, but as an aspect of 
physics known by another channel than any of the ordinary 
sense-channels by which we know physics — something which 
in that sense is truly beyond physics (fisra ra <f>vcriK:d). 
It is impossible to describe a sound in terms of sight, or a 
sight in terms of smell, or a touch in terms of taste; a green 
sound or a blue smell or a bitter light would not be thought 
by sane men to be terms of much meaning ; but these 
different senses may all be affected by one and the same 
object through its different properties, and they are all 
functions of one and the same body. It is protested loudly 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 30 

enough that movement cannot explain thought ; and it 
certainly is impossible to think the transformation of that 
which we perceive objectively as movement into that which 
we are conscious of subjectively as thought : to say so is 
equivalent to saying that light cannot be heard, nor sound 
seen, nor one mode of perception ever be another mode of 
perception. But if any one could conceive himself capable 
of perceiving movement subjectively — that is, by self-con- 
sciousness, and of perceiving thought objectively — that is, 
through the senses, the reconciliation might not be incon- 
ceivable ; in that case metaphysics, objectively studied, 
would be the physics of mind, and physics, subjectively 
studied, would be the metaphysics of matter. 

We do not insist upon keeping rigorously apart, because 
each is special, the respective testimonies of the several 
senses ; on the contrary, we justly insist on bringing them 
together, comparing and combining them so as to get the 
fullest information we can about the object by which they 
are severally affected ; we will have the concordant testimony 
of two or three witnesses, or rather of all the witnesses that 
we can succeed in bringing into relation with it. The con- 
sequence is that one witness supplements and sometimes 
corrects another, and the evidence is strengthened. When 
I know an orange, I know it by what sight and touch and 
taste and smell have respectively told me about it, my per- 
ception of it being the organised association of their ex- 
periences ; and if one of the witnesses chances to be mistaken 
the other witnesses come in to supplement its deficiencies or 
to correct its mistakes. But it is not so with the internal 
revelations of consciousness; it works alone, independent 
and self-sufficing ; and if it chances to go wrong there is no 
one to warn or to correct it. It can never feel therefore 
that it is wrong and that it requires to be supplemented or 
set right, any more than a particular sight or sound can be 
self-corrective ; indeed, it never is wrong in its direct de- 
liverance, since this is purely the expression of its state at 
the time, the direct statement of its immediate experience. 
There is no doubt of the feeling, be it sound or morbid, and 
that is all that there is no doubt about. 



40 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

But to lay hold of that indisputable fact and forthwith 
to base upon it the dogma of an infallible authority of con- 
sciousness with respect to the worth of these direct deliver- 
ances, the value in sterling coin of experience which they 
represent, is a procedure that is by no means legitimate ; 
they may be sterling or they may be trash ; it merely makes 
them known, as the sun illumines indifferently mosque or 
mud hut. Any direct deliverance of consciousness at any 
moment is what it is by virtue of the manifold objective and 
subjective experiences of the individual, by which has been 
built up by degrees the mind-nature of which it is the 
present outcome ; and its value, little or much, as true or as 
false coin, depends upon the character of these antecedent 
processes. It is vain pretence then to discover in the intui- 
tion of consciousness an immanent criterion of truthfulness, 
for whoso begins with the ego will infallibly end with the 
ego : the inward revelation must be brought into comparison 
with the knowledge obtained through other sources in order 
to be tested and approved. Can there be a greater absurdity, 
when we think of it, a more completely knowledge-annihi- 
lating device than to pretend to keep provinces of knowledge, 
however acquired, rigorously asunder ! To assert liberty and 
self-sufiicingness in one science, and necessity and inter- 
dependence in all other sciences, is really the negation of ail 
science. It is a gaping contradiction in the very foundation 
of knowledge, which renders any stable superstructure im- 
possible ; for how can man, being one, have real knowledge 
unless it is unity of knowledge ? How make for himself a 
synthesis of the world if he is required to preserve an 
absolute separation, an impassable chasm, between two 
regions of knowledge ? 

If you would know what is the positive value of the 
direct deliverance of an individual consciousness, you must 
compare it with the deliverances of consciousness in other 
persons ; it must be supplemented and corrected by these 
aids in the social organism, as one sense is supplemented and 
corrected by another sense in the bodily organism. My 
subjective states are to be appraised by another's objective 
observation of them in their modes of outward expression, 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 41 

as his subjective states are to be appraised by my objective 
observation of them. Assuredly they are not of the least 
value except in their objective relations ; for however price- 
less to him as direct intuitions of his consciousness, they 
cannot be communicated by direct sympathy to another 
person's self-consciousness. There is a common sense arising 
from the uniformities of experience of similarly constituted 
beings in similar circumstances which corrects the vagaries 
of the individual, who may have some peculiarity of constitu- 
tion or be affected by some peculiarity of circumstance. 
Were all people on earth compounded, framed and consti- 
tuted exactly alike, and placed in exactly the same circum- 
stances, they would, freewill notwithstanding, all feel exactly 
alike, think exactly alike, act exactly alike ; it is in fact 
what they do now in respect of matters in which they are 
most nearly alike — their sexual relations, to wit. Similarly 
constituted mentally and having a similar experience, they 
must of necessity arrive at certain common truths ; just as, 
their bodies being what they are, they are bound to develop 
certain common bodily movements. Scientific truths are no 
more than truths which any man of sound intelligence who 
had the adequate special experience and training could not 
help reaching, if he set himself to work in the proper 
quarter. The sciences are the developments of common sense 
in special directions. 

A logical inference, the perception of a general law, a 
mathematical demonstration, the certainty of an arithmetical 
calculation, the confidence of each daily action among men 
and things, the understanding of another's language and the 
certainty that mine in turn will be understood : — all these 
appeal, as it were, to some certainty in me which is more 
than myself. It is the common mind of the race in me, 
which belongs to me as one of my kind — the common sense 
of mankind, if you will. Because the hind is in me and I 
am a living element of it, I cannot help consciously or un- 
consciously appealing to and silently acknowledging its rules 
and sanctions. There is no rule to distinguish between true 
and false but the common judgment of mankind, no rule to 
distinguish between virtue and vice but the common feeling 



42 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

of mankind. Wherefore the truth of one age is the fable of 
the next, the virtue of one epoch or nation the vice of 
another epoch or nation, and the individual whose judgment 
is deranged has his private truth-standard that is utterly 
false. Common sense, which embodies that which is 
common in the experiences of multitudes of different 
individuals — that in them which is generic and eosential, 
as distinguished from the incidental and passing — is there- 
fore more sensible than any individual in all cases, save in 
the exceptional case of a pre-eminently gifted person of 
genius who has a special insight and is in advance of his 
age ; to his level must common sense slowly rise by a gradual 
development of such more special sensibilities and reactions 
as he possesses. But even in that rare case the superiority 
is in some special direction of thought and action rather 
than a general pre-eminence ; it does not embrace the re- 
lations of mankind all round, so that it remains a true saying 
that no one has so much sense as the common sense of 
mankind. 

It has been the custom to make a mighty deal of the 
difference between instinct and reason, the inclination always 
being, from a desire to exalt reason, to put a wider gap 
between them than actually exists. In regard to that 
matter I shall take leave to make two propositions by way of 
raising the low and bringing down the high — first, that logic 
is just as mechanical as instinct ; and, secondly, that instinct 
is virtually the stereotyped common sense of the species. 
It is impossible for any human being of properly developed 
understanding who comprehends distinctly the premises of a 
simple syllogism to avoid arriving at the plain logical 
conclusion; he is compelled to it by as fatal a necessity as 
any animal is to obey its instinct; all the liberty of his 
reason, if it be sound reason, is to obey that necessity. Is 
there any instinct more mechanical than that? In the lower 
animals their few simple wants, determining a few simple 
relations with the external world, are met by certain 
fixed habits or so-called instincts of action, and they 
necessarily make no mistake so long as the external rela- 
tions are not changed; their instincts represent the 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 43 

generalised and capitalised experiences of the kind in adap- 
tation to those relations ; they are, as it were, the embodied 
common sense arising from the uniformities of experience of 
similarly constituted beings in similar circumstances. In 
some of the highest animals these primitive wants and 
desires are also the centres of a few simple ideas and voli- 
tions which revolve round them, and, aiding in their 
gratification, are supplements to them ; but being very 
simple in character for the most part, and of the same degree 
of development in the individuals of the same species, the 
actions which they lead to are pretty uniform in the same 
circumstances ; it is only when a change of circumstances 
makes a demand upon the animal's powers of adapta- 
tion that we observe decided proofs of their existence. In 
man the uniformities of belief and conduct are far less, since 
multitudes of elements enter into complex reasonings, judg- 
ments and volitions ; and, as these differ in different persons 
according to differences of constitution, temper, age, experi- 
ence, circumstances of life and the like, issue in results that 
are necessarily various, uncertain, seemingly capricious, and 
free; for when there are as many judgments and wills 
concerning an object as there are individuals to judge and 
will — of which only one in the end can be right — the opinion 
may well arise that they indicate self-determination. It is 
not, however, that they are really undetermined, but it is 
that the determination is contingent, and not therefore to be 
predicted. The prerogative which man has over animals to 
err, is the mark of his larger and freer capacity to' receive 
and to respond to impressions from the external world ; the 
superiority lies not in the mistakes which he makes but in 
the power which he has to make them, that power being the 
correlative of the power and inclination which he has to 
make more special and complex adaptations. While inequali- 
ties of intelligence therefore make inequalities of judgments 
and acts in all complex cases, there is in plain judgments 
concerning simple cases an absence of mistakes, a uniformity 
of general agreement that is hardly less mechanical and 
authoritative than instinct. So would it be also in the more 
complex cases if we had all the elements of the problem and 



44 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT 

their exact relations to one another as clearly in view. A 
man might as well, from a consciousness of power in him- 
self, think to elude the law of gravitation in his actions, as, 
from any seeming self-sufficient intuition of consciousness, 
imagine he can in his thought dispense with the common 
experience of the race. 

If the foregoing reflections he well founded, they warrant 
these conclusions ; first, that the deliverance of conscious- 
ness, whether the state thereof be stirred by internal or 
external causes, is just as immediate in the one case as in the 
other, and neither state has an exclusive prerogative or 
even a pre-eminence of dignity and authority over the other ; 
and, secondly, that the interpretation of the value of the 
direct deliverance is in both cases a matter of observa- 
tion and experience, not an instance of direct intuition — 
in the one case by the co-operating aids of the different 
senses, as the result of the unity of the bodily organism, and 
in the other case by the co-operating aids of the deliverances 
of self-consciousness in other persons, as the result of the 
unity of the social organism. We invoke that common 
store of sense, feeling, opinion which results from the 
social union of men similarly constituted and working 
together in a common medium by common methods to 
common ends, and which, incorporate in language, laws, 
customs, habits, institutions, envelopes and penetrates them 
like a social atmosphere from the first hour of life to the 
last. To descant upon the self-sufficiency of an individual's 
self-consciousness is hardly more reasonable than it would 
be to descant upon the self-sufficiency of a single sense. The 
authority of direct personal intuition is the authority of the 
lunatic's direct intuition that he is the Messiah; the 
vagaries of whose mad thoughts notoriously cannot be 
rectified until he can be got to abandon his isolating self- 
sufficiency and to place confidence in the assurances and 
acts of others. 

May we not justly say of the individual that he is bathed 
in a social atmosphere which he breathes and is nourished 
by mentally, just as each individual element of bodily tissue 
is bathed in a fluid medium poured round it from the blood ? 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 45 

And as the blood is a highly manufactured fluid which has its 
place and function intermediate between the living element 
within and the aliment supplied from without the body ; so 
the social atmosphere is a highly compound and, as it were, 
humanity-manufactured medium that is intermediate between 
the individual and direct personal relations with the external 
world. Without its social atmosphere, its sustenance and 
support, a mind could no more live and breathe than an 
element of tissue could live without its nutritive medium : 
the feeling of solidarity pervades the individual, as his blood 
circulates, unconsciously, vitalising him as a social being. 
Let the social medium undergo disintegration, as it does in 
catastrophes like the French Revolution, and what a terrible 
spectacle of violent distrust, insane suspicions, unreasoning 
hatreds, fearful brutalities, crimes, frenzies and horrors does 
man present ! Without its support he falls into mental 
convulsions, as the body, drained of its blood, falls into 
physical convulsions. 

It will not be amiss by way of summary to set forth one 
final reflection before ending this section. It is the obvious 
reflection that everything which we know is a synthesis of 
subject and object, the outcome of subject plus object ; and, 
therefore, every phase of consciousness being that, directly or 
remotely, neither matter-in-itself nor mind-in-itself are words 
that have any meaning. The consciousness of the ego is 
itself phenomenal, a relation ; and if so, a relation of what ? 
It matters not what you call the synthesis — subject and 
object, mind and matter, or what not — it is the only know- 
able ; the absolutely unknowable is object without subject 
and subject without object. The hypothesis of an external 
world is a good working hypothesis within all human expe- 
rience, but to ask whether the external world exists apart 
from all human experience is about as sensible a question as 
to ask whether the shadow belongs to the sun or to the 
man's body ; for what an extraordinarily perverse and futile 
ingenuity it palpably is to attempt to think anything outside 
human consciousness, and what a signal absurdity to apply 
any terms of human experience to what is not within human 
experience ! To say there is an absolute and to call it the 



46 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

unknowable, is it a whit more philosophical than it would 
be for a bluebottle fly to call its extra-relational the unbuz- 
zable ? It is true that we can speak, and in some sort think, of 
mind and matter separately, as we think, or think we think, 
separately of inside and outside, circumference and centre, 
but we cannot divorce them in fact. The divorce is a philo- 
sophical fiction. If any one insists on making a divorce in 
theory which is impossible in fact, he may build up a 
theoretical system of philosophy, laying it down as a founda- 
tion-principle of such philosophy that it is impossible to 
conceive the passage from the one to the other — whereby 
happily also it is saved from a tragical collision with facts — 
but it is a philosophy of words at the end of all. Having 
defined matter as that which is multiple, divisible, and 
occupies space, and having then defined mind by as exact a 
negation of these qualities as he can make — that is, as 
something that is simple, indivisible, and does not occupy 
space, he may ask prettily and triumphantly how can that 
which has extension act upon that which has not extension ? 
Therein he is very much like a professor of moral philosophy 
who, having defined light as the absence of darkness, and 
darkness as the absence of light, should go on to ask his 
admiring pupil to set forth the relations between these two 
fundamental existences. Beginning with two contradictory 
and mutually exclusive definitions, it is somewhat gratuitous 
and superfluous to vex oneself by inquiring how they can be 
brought into any sort of accord. From that standpoint the 
idealism of Berkeley is assuredly unanswerable ; nay, per- 
haps the welcome and truly logical outcome of it would be 
Leibnitz's theory of two clocks going and striking together 
by a divinely pre-established harmony. 

A separation of subject and object cannot ever be the 
starting-point of a philosophy that is not a self-foolery. 
The simplest, primitive, irreducible affection of consciousness 
which we call feeling is not really the simple thing it appears 
inwardly, but actually a very compound effect. There is 
a necessary order of events antecedent to it : a stimulus 
to a nerve of sense, a conduction of energy to the brain, a 
particular change of a part of the brain in consequence, 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 47 

and thereupon or therewith an inseparably consequent or 
coincident state of consciousness; nor could all the con- 
sciousnesses in the world ever have a sensation of the 
meanest sort without these physical antecedents, immediate 
or remote. Neither the cerebral change nor the coincident 
state of consciousness can be described as pure object or 
pure subject; both represent object plus subject, either 
immediately as direct experience, or intermediately through 
the registration of past experience ; and the notion that con- 
sciousness can come into any relation with the object directly 
and purely, or with, the subject directly and purely, is 
revealed as a manifest absurdity. 

It was a very natural rebellion which the common sense 
of mankind made against the Berkleian doctrine that matter 
had no existence save in the idea which we have of it, when 
the accepted opinion of an idea was that it was the pure 
affection of an essentially separate and independent internal 
entity called mind, having no affinity with matter, and the 
separate affections of which had no causal connection with 
the cerebral reactions to objects, no relation with them but 
that of an arbitrary parallel concomitancy. It was the in- 
stinctive rebellion of consciousness against a suicidal doctrine 
that would rob it of half its being. For the idea is truly 
a synthesis, the ego and non-ego necessary correlates ; and 
not to think the existence of the not-self is as impossible as 
to think the non-existence of self — indeed, to think the 
existence of one without the other i3 unachievable. The 
belief of them, like all other beliefs, may be brought back 
by analysis in the last resort to the simple basis of a reflex or 
sensori-motor process; the receptive or passive side thereof 
furnishing the basis of the ego, the reactive or active side 
the basis of the non-ego. That is the physiological unit of 
mental function. Why is it that the primary properties 
of matter always seem to be more objective than its so- 
called secondary properties ? It is because, being more 
gross and palpable, we perceive more plainly the causes of 
our affections by them, can react upon these palpable causes 
by fitting movements, and so, grasping them physically, 
apprehend them better mentally. The recoil of these 



48 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

movements upon consciousness through the channels of 
muscular sense — the backrush, as • it were, of their formal 
sensibilities whereby they become particular motor intuitions 
— must needs be a different kind of consciousness from that 
which is stirred through any one of the external senses, 
except in those cases in which similar muscular adaptations 
take place, as is notably the case in trained vision and less 
notably, but not less certainly, so in every discrimination of 
sense. That special mode of consciousness will be what we 
call consciousness of resistance or object-consciousness. It is 
to touch and its motor adaptations primarily, to sight and 
its motor adaptations secondarily, but to motor adaptations in 
all cases, as Mair e de Biran pointed out long ago, 1 that we owe 
mainly, or entirely, our conception of the non-ego. Is there 
a single state of definite consciousness into which a motor 
element does not, explicitly or implicitly, enter ? And if not, 
how manifestly absurd it is seen to be to talk of the ego as if 
it had existence or meaning apart from the non-ego ! 

That the physiological unit of which mental structure is 
built up is a reflex act, is a statement, objectively reached, that 
accords well with what self-consciousness teaches are the 
simple and irreducible facts of psychology — namely, sensation 
and the sense of reaction ; which last is, in other words, the 
sense of effort or resistance. Now these irreducible feelings 
are the conscious expressions of deeper unconscious facts — 
namely, of definite susceptibility to impressions and definite 
reaction thereto, which are common properties of all organic 
matter. It is the superaddition or accompaniment of con- 
sciousness that makes them sensation and effort ; and with it 
comes necessarily at the same time the desire to ensue pleasant 
and to eschew painful impressions. Were it not to digress too 
much, it would be interesting to trace the physiological unit of 
a simple reflex act through a succession of its multiplying asso- 
ciations, and to exhibit its corresponding outcomes in compli- 
cating processes of belief and will. For if we inquire closely 
what a belief in its ultimate basis is we shall find it to be the 
conscious representative of an organised complex reflex act. 

1 Following in this, as it appears, an earlier inquirer. See Revue Philoso- 
phique, October 1882. 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 49 

My belief is really my open or tacit conviction that on the 
occasion of certain definite impressions upon my senses I 
shall be able to react in relation to them by certain definite 
and fitting adaptations. It might be described as habit, or 
rather habit in the formation, as habit might be called un- 
conscious belief; for it is formed, just as habit is formed, by 
the repetition of impressions and of the fitting reactions to 
them, until a definite function is fixed. We are restless and 
dissatisfied, in doubt, until we have formed the habit or belief, 
because doubt is an active state of attempt to make the 
fitting adjustment, belief a quiet state of accomplished 
adjustment. Infuse passion into it from the depths of the 
organic life, and you get passionate belief. One needs not 
really for one's comfort a true belief, whatever that may be ; 
all that is required is a belief that one believes to be true. 
Belief is not a fixed but a fluent state, though its motion 
sometimes, like that of a great glacier, may be so slow as to 
be perceptible only in a reach of years. Individuals advance 
or retrograde from one belief to another, as mankind advance 
or retrograde from one system of belief to another ; for ideas 
and doctrines being mortal, like all things human, grow, 
decay, and die. To do in his place in life is the proper func- 
tion of man, the true end of thought and belief; the mean- 
ing at the bottom of belief is what habit of action it pro- 
duces ; action therefore is the test of clear meaning in a 
belief. To know the truth it is necessary to do the truth ; 
and to know what a man's real beliefs are you must study 
his conduct. We rightly seek the meaning of the abstract 
in the concrete because we cannot act in relation to the 
abstract, which is only a representative sign ; we must give 
it a concrete form in order to make it a clear and distinct 
idea ; until we have done so we don't know that we really 
believe, only believe that we believe it. A truth is best cer- 
tified to be a truth when we live it and have ceased to talk 
about it. 

Consider well, then, what a multitude of elements any 
belief implies; not elements only that have contributed to its 
formation and become integrant parts of its structure, but 
those also that co-operate silently in its function. Ccn- 



50 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

sciousness is signally incompetent to give a satisfactory 
account of them, since they mostly belong to the domain of 
infra-sensibility, and only a few rise into sensibility and intel- 
ligence. Oftentimes we invoke studiously two or three 
conscious arguments for a belief, and are content with them, 
whereas they are perhaps the least part of its true basis, 
which is actually a great multitude of inferences and 
analogies that have combined in mental synthesis below the 
threshold of consciousness ; the tide of them, as it were, 
breaking into consciousness with a force and in a direction 
that differ greatly according to varying bodily states, states 
of memory, present circumstances, and the like. How often 
does it happen that a person believes and decides, on the 
occasion of some pleasant impression that is utterly unre- 
lated to the matter in hand, or of a happy sense of bodily 
comfort, something which he never would have believed and 
decided had no such pleasant impression been made, and 
which he would perhaps have believed and decided otherwise 
if, instead thereof, an unpleasant impression had been made ! 
From the depths of our .beirg reinforcing and opposing 
forces come into action continually to urge and to check, 
without our being in the least aware of their nature and 
operation. 

Is it not a little remarkable that the purest of pure 
idealists shows virtually the greatest distrust of consciousness 
at the very moment when he exalts its authority to infalli- 
bility ? In maintaining that all which we know positively 
and immediately, all that we are indisputably sure of, are its 
subjective states, he actually declares that the very positive 
revelation of an external world which it makes us, including 
therein all other human beings and their consciousnesses, 
may be pure illusion. Now it is quite certain that every- 
body feels as sure of the reality of the external object, 
illusion though it be, as he does of the reality of himself, 
the subject, that he has as positive an intuition of the one 
as he has of the other ; wherefore it is plain that conscious- 
ness is deceiving him, if not as to the existence of an 
external world, at any rate as to the value of its testimony 
in any case, forasmuch as it testifies to the object quite as 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 51 

positively as it does to the subject. If, then, it speaks with 
as strong certitude when it is saying what may be false as it 
does when it is telling the truth, how are we to know when 
to trust its assurances ? 

Suppose a number of dreamers to be going through the 
same dream-drama at the same time ; able to communicate 
with one another by a subtile sympathy, so as to know that 
they were all witnessing the same dream-events in the same 
order; and never awaking to find it was a dream; — they 
would certainly believe in the objective existence of their 
subjective experiences. May not that be life ? And the 
true question be not what the external world is, but how we 
are delusively thinking it? After all, the world which we 
apprehend when we are awake may have as little resem- 
blance, proportion, or relation to the external world of 
which we can have no manner of apprehension through our 
senses, as the dream-world has to the world with which our 
senses make us acquainted ; nay, perhaps less, since there is 
some resemblance in the latter case and there may be none 
whatever in the former. Our dreams are founded on the 
experience of our senses in waking life ; the supposed 
dreamers of the same dream never could have dreamed it 
had they not been awake at one time, and so obtained 
through similar sense-experiences the material and the forms 
of perception which served them in the dream. Clever in 
invention as the dreamer is, he never dreams the ultra- 
relational — the external world as it is outside his relations 
to it, in itself. But the external world as it is in itself may 
not be in the least like what we conceive it through our 
forms of perception and modes of thought ; no prior ex- 
perience of it has ever been so much as possible; and there- 
fore the analogy of the dreamer is altogether defective in 
that respect. 

The analogy is not, however, without instructive appli- 
cation to the external world, not as it is in itself, but as we 
know it ; which is the question now. Is there such external 
world ? We may suppose, I think, that mankind, like the 
dreamer, never could have constructed the illusion of a world 
outside it, without having acquired the material and form of 



52 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

the illusion in real experience : the conception of external 
illusion would be impossible without the conception of an 
external not-illusion ; to speak of an illusion of sense is to 
imply necessarily a prior real experience of sense in the 
race or in the individual ; otherwise the word illusion would 
have no meaning, and could not ever have been formed. 
Were common sense suffered to intrude into such high 
matters, it would probably conclude that men never could 
have constructed ideally the external world in the same 
fashion all the world over, had they not had long and patient 
experience of it, first, preconsciously, then dimly consciously, 
then through all degrees of brightening consciousness from 
its dawn up to clear noontide. Is not the dream of it, if 
dream it be, founded on that basis of antecedent experience ? 
Organic matter means by its very nature an involution of 
the external, as will be set forth more at length hereafter ; 
and between human thought and the external world there 
lies all the experience-involuted organic matter from its 
simplest protoplasmic speck up to its highest evolution in 
the nervous system of man. The worth of the testimony of 
consciousness as to an external world, then, may well be 
greater than the worth of its subjective testimony, since it 
is pretty certain that the consciousnesses of other persons, 
and the consciousnesses of animals, in so far as they are 
similarly constituted, give the same kind of evidence. 

"What the world may appear to the sensations of a 
creature whose organisation is not in the least like mine, is 
quite another matter. The external world which the ojster 
perceives or feels is assuredly an external world entirely 
other than that which I perceive. But its poor perception 
— if it gets so far — and its answering reactions are relations 
of its self or ego to a real external ; one which 1 perceive to 
be around it, far outside the range of its relations, as I, 
whom it perceives not in the least, am myself. It is a 
useful incidental lesson for me, who may learn from it how 
much is outside my perception and what monstrous absur- 
dity, on my part, it is to make any proposition concerning 
it. The only noumenon which either oyster or I know is 
the noumenon that is in the phenomena ; it is impossible 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 53 

either of us should know anything except as it is manifested 
and is felt or thought, not in itself, but in us. I don't want 
to think the thing-in-itself, but I want to think it in me : if 
it is out of me, it does not exist for me — cannot possibly be 
more than a nonsensical word in any expression of me ; and 
for me to think it out of me, as it is in itself, would be anni- 
hilation of myself. Now it is plain that the world which I 
perceive, but which the oyster perceives not, has an existence 
outside the oyster's consciousness, whether that existence 
and the oyster itself be real external existences or, as some 
might argue, only subjective existences within me. If the 
latter be so, then it is possible that I, in like manner, 
may exist only in the consciousness of a being as much 
above me as I am above the oyster. In any case, however, 
it is quite clear that I and my consciousness exist outside 
the oyster's consciousness, even if the oyster exist only in 
me ; that there is a real world of that sort external to the 
oyster or to my special oyster-consciousness, since in no case 
is the latter co-extensive with my consciousness. 

By like reasoning I feel compelled to admit the existence 
of a real world external to me, whether it be a world of 
supreme consciousness or a world of supreme substance. 
Indeed, is it not the fact that every other person's con- 
sciousness is a real existence external to me ? Will the 
most extreme idealist undertake consistently to maintain 
that the consciousness of Newton had no real existence 
outside the consciousness of the servant who blacked his 
boots ? Where, then, do we come to ? If there be a world 
of consciousness external to me, and if the only reality be in 
consciousness, then my real existence to another person is 
in his consciousness — that is, external to myself; and his 
real existence to me in like manner in my consciousness 
— that is, external to him. But where does he get his 
consciousness of me, seeing that be can't get at my con- 
sciousness, which is the only real me ; and where do I get 
consciousness of him, seeing that I can't get at his con- 
sciousness? He has got my real existence in him, and I 
have got his real existence in me ; notwithstanding that we 
have not the least power of getting at one another's con- 



54 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

sciousnesses, which are the only realities. All which is a 
triumph of philosophy or a reductio ad dbsurdum, according 
to the light in which one elects to view it. 

One might pursue a similar argument with regard to 
freewill. I am free to myself, as thing-in-itself, says 
philosophy, not free to others as phenomenal objects which 
they observe, study, determine and calculate upon ; as another 
person is free to himself, as thing-in-itself, but not free to me 
who observe, study, determine, and calculate upon him. His 
freedom then being to rae and to all other persons pheno- 
menal, that is to say, being in all practical relations, in every 
expression of it, a case of determination, and my freedom 
having the same aspect to him and to all other persons, my 
freedom has no real existence in any consciousness outside 
my own ; it cannot therefore be counted upon, or even ad- 
mitted, by others in the events of life, and if not a pure 
illusion of my own, is, being not ever apparent, as good as a 
non-existent, except so far as the belief or illusion of it may 
be of subjective use to me. 

Discussions of the kind are struck with an eternal 
barrenness, because they are based on the notion of a self 
that has being apart from external nature, instead of a self 
that has being only as a part of it : they are little better 
than discussions about the contents of consciousness when 
beforehand its contents have been emptied out of it. Self 
and the world do not exist apart, and cannot be thought 
apart; and it would be just as true, if not more true, to say 
that it is the not-self, not the self, which alone has real ex- 
istence, as it is to say that the world exists only in the abstract 
consciousness with which, by a self-beguiling trick, psycho- 
logists invest each individual. Consciousness testifies to the 
not-self with as good evidence as to the self, since there is 
no consciousness apart from a particular state thereof, and 
each such state, whether it be a mode of simple sensation 
or of complex will, is a synthesis of the two. It is the 
custom of the psychologist — who would persuade you that he 
can discover and expound the machinery and working of 
the clock by watching the pointer, or at any rate can set 
forth an ideal machinery that is more real than the real one 



CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 55 

— to affirm authoritatively that lie knows immediately his 
own consciousness, implying or asserting that he does not 
know the external world immediately ; but to say that he 
knows his consciousness is nonsense, since it is the conscious- 
ness that is the knowing, and to say that he is conscious is 
to suppose an ego prior to consciousness. What he knows 
or is conscious of in any case are the contents of conscious- 
ness ; and they are neither more nor less immediate or inter- 
mediate in one case than in another. 

Seeing that every act of consciousness is a synthesis of 
ego and non-ego, and that without a non-ego there could not 
be any consciousness at all in me, is it not perfectly legiti- 
mate to say that I know the external world immediately, 
and have as good testimony to it a3 I have to myself? And 
none the less legitimate, if you assume the ego to be the 
contents of consciousness of which alone you are supposed 
to get immediate knowledge by it ; for the ego without the 
non-ego is impossible in fact and meaningless in thought, and 
the abstraction of the ego from the bodily organisation and 
the intuition of itself by itself as a non-bodily entity is an 
artificial and deceptive process. To any affection whatever 
of consciousness a prior state of brain is essential ; and to 
say so much as that is to involve the external world in every 
act of consciousness, since it is by involution of the external 
that the structure of the mental organisation has been 
framed. All which, if true, clearly leaves no place where 
the will may get the self-sufficing nature which the theory of 
its freedom demands. Certainly no absurdity can be greater 
than those are guilty of who, accepting the external world 
as illusion, fly for a reality to a self-evolving universal and 
absolute Will in nature, the evidence of which must needs be 
just as illusive. 'Tis but another instance of the relative 
pleased to dupe itself with the conceit of having got beyond 
its relativity by merely enlarging its relative conception. 



5Q WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

SECTION IY. 

THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OP CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Without doubt there are many persons who will say that 
they care not a jot for these vain and empty disquisitions 
concerning the authority of consciousness, being positively 
sure of one thing : that on a particular occasion every one 
has the power to choose and decide between two actions, as, 
for example, to turn this way or that, or to move this foot or 
that, when he has no motive to do the one act rather than 
the other ; and that he can at any moment make the experi- 
ment to test and prove this. He has no shadow of doubt 
that he possesses that freedom of acting. 

So far good ; but let it be noted, in the first place, that 
he is by the nature of the supposed problem under the 
compulsion of motive to choose to do the One or the other ; 
that the extent of determination is very great, and the 
extent of freedom very small, being the narrowest freedom 
only within the limits of determination : in the second place, 
that he could not choose to do the one or the other, could 
not resolve to move hand or foot as required, except for the 
power of definitely willing either act, which he has gained 
by previous training and practice ; the particular freedom 
resting upon that consolidated basis of antecedent deter- 
minations ; his whole nature, inherited and acquired, lying 
in its executive capacity as means and instrument between 
motive and act : in the third place, that he has selected for 
experiment a seemingly completely indifferent instance — one 
in which it is not of the smallest consequence which way the 
decision goes ; in which therefore the motive that causes the 
descent of the one scale of the oscillating balance must be of 
the lightest kind possible, hardly more than the shadow of a 
motive, not so much as presumably appreciable. Is it great 
wonder that he fails to apprehend it ? He thinks perchance 
after some vacillation that he will turn to the left, and then, 
just as he is on the point of doing so, he determines, out of 
the caprice to show his freedom, to turn to the right, bring- 



THE POSITIVE ASSUKANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 57 

ing into operation that motive. Anyhow the area of un- 
determined will has, by the conditions of the problem, by the 
antecedent conditions of the power to will at all in the 
matter, and by the exceeding lightness of the motive needed, 
been brought to a more than microscopic minuteness. 

For as to the determination : it is plain that, in order to 
try the matter, he has made a general determination to do 
one of two things, the one or the other of which must ensue 
from the continuance of the act of determination once started ; 
secondly, that he has determined to leave the final decision 
to the last moment and to the last then intervening impulse 
or accident, insomuch that, so far from deliberately choos- 
ing and willing it, he cuts himself off from the opportunity 
and power of doing so : he leaves, in fact, to accident the 
particular diversion of action by which his general determina- 
tion to do this or that becomes the particular determination 
to do this. It is as if a person, rolling a stone down a steep 
declivity, which, once the impulse is given to it, he knows 
must go with gathering force to the bottom, were undeter- 
mined on which side of a given mark, the narrowest visible, 
it should go, determined only that it should go as near the 
mark as possible on the one side or the other. His act of de- 
termination, once started, continues in force, and necessitates 
a particular result ; but what the result shall be is not the act 
of his choice or will, but the effect of some chance-collision 
which the stone makes in its descent, or of the accidental bias 
which all unawares he has given to it in the initial throw. 
Then as to the exceeding smallness, the intangibility, so to 
speak, of the impulse or incident which determines the par- 
ticular result in the fore- supposed case of oscillating will : 
it is not thought anywise strange that there are objects too 
small to be seen except by the highest power of the micro- 
scope, or even to be seen by any power thereof; nor is it the 
least doubtful that intensely active molecules imperceptible 
to sense, veritably extra-sensual, are the foundation of the 
properties of all visible matter; it surely then is not a 
matter of the smallest wonder that in those physico-mental 
functions, which of all the operations in nature known to us 
are the finest and most subtile, there are agencies so fine, so 
5 



58 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

little material, as to be inapprehensible in themselves and 
known only by their effects. 

Where there is nearly an equilibrium of vice in a 
character a little virtue goes a long way, but where there 
is a perfect equilibrium of choice there can be no decision. 
It was Bonnet, I believe, who made the supposition that if 
a soul independent of the body were placed between two 
objects exactly alike, or which appeared so, two desires of 
exactly equal weight and quality, it would rest in equilibrium, 
since there could be nothing to incline it to the one or to 
the other : it would realise in itself the ideal position of 
perfect freedom, being a will so free from motive as to be 
incompetent to move, so exempt from determination that it 
could not determine. For what could determine it the one 
way or the other ? Not the objects, since they are exactly 
alike. Not desire, since there could be no desire to one or 
the other ; or if to one, then equally to the other. Not a 
caprice of liberty, since there is nothing to stir caprice in 
so pure and refined an immaterial substance placed exactly 
in the centre of indifference ; the very notion of caprice in- 
volving necessarily the simultaneous notion of not-caprice 
or motive, which is excluded by the statement of the con- 
ditions of the problem. But let this soul be united to a 
body, it is then indifferent no longer, for it is subject every 
moment to numberless impressions, of various degrees and 
kinds, streaming into it from every part of the divers 
structures of the complex and individual whole ; some of 
them more, others less, sensible to consciousness, many of 
them insensible. Then it is impossible for it to be indif- 
ferent. But because its tone is thus affected intimately and 
deeply by impressions which it is unconscious of, it is 
ignorant that it is moved by any pressure, and believes itself 
to be acting indifferently. 

Assuredly the brain is not to be conceived rightly as a 
soft and inert substance, quiet in the molecules as in the 
mass, but far otherwise : as the seat of countless multitudes 
of molecular tremors that are in relation with every part of 
the body, repelling and attracting one another, reinforcing 
and neutralising, uniting into complex and separating into 



THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 59 

simpler harmonies ; and it is the sum or outcome of the 
whole of these intimate, intricate, and impalpable intestine 
motions which appears in the illumination of consciousness. 
It is a little strange perhaps that it has not occurred to 
some one, reflecting 1 how imperfectly our gross conceptions 
of matter cover the infinitely minute and subtile elements of 
matter that minister to mental functions, to propound the 
theory of a special ether pervading the brain, if not the 
universe, more subtile even than the space-pervading lumini- 
ferous ether, and to call it the mentiferous ether. 

In the previously supposed case of the individual in a 
state of as great indifference as possible, in a state conse- 
quently which the least impulse was capable of disturbing, 
if he did not act from a caprice of showing his freedom by 
doing the opposite of what his first thought was to do, but 
acted without thinking or caring in the least what he did, 
without any conscious motive, he certainly acted from the 
inclination of his present nature ; the required little turn 
between the two paths, one of which he must take, being 
given probably by some insensible bodily impulse. Do you 
ask by what impulse ? By one or another of a thousand 
possible bodily impulses : perhaps by an artery of one side 
of the body going more directly to the brain, or having a 
fuller stream of blood in it, than the corresponding artery 
on the other side ; perhaps by a slight difference in tem- 
perature between one nerve-centre and another ; perhaps 
by the insensible impression of some visceral organ upon the 
brain, or by one of many other similar conceivable causes. 
The shades that wander forlorn in the realms of Tartarus, 
being well-nigh rid of their bodies, are they therefore more 
free than we who are heavily encumbered with the trammels 
of them? Alas! they have perhaps discovered that in 
losing their bodies they have lost the very sources of will, 
and now feel it their eternal misery to wander eternally 
will-less. It happens frequently, in a matter about which we 
find it difficult to choose or decide, that we know not in the 
least what determination we shall come to until we actually 
come to it ; then perhaps we are at a loss to know what 
determined us, and either remain puzzled and uncertain, or 



6*0 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

are not satisfied until we have thought out some motive 
which, though it had little or nothing to do with the result, 
we are happy to persuade ourselves was the actuating one. 

It may be assumed that pure intelligence or pure reason 
could not determine action at all, since such purity would 
be the extinction of desire, perfect repose, a passionless 
peace of mind ; the fundamental spring of action, through 
whatever complex developments of sentiment it may go, is 
the desire to gain pleasure and to shun pain — that is to say, 
the impulse to maintain and increase life. The conflict 
between two issues in the mind is not a conflict really 
between reason and desire, intelligence and passion, as 
simple opposing forces, the mighty intelligence of a man 
like Bacon being notoriously powerless to overcome one of 
the meanest passions of human nature, but a conflict 
between desire and desire ; the counterpull of the one 
against the other not being for the most part a single desire, 
but the resultant of a complex interaction of desires in that 
which we call deliberation or reason. May we not say of 
passion that it is distributed through the whole body, and 
of reason that it is confined to the supreme centres of the 
brain, because it is in them that the desires fight out their 
battles, and by the struggle which they make for existence 
attain and maintain an equilibrium? What number of 
conflicting or modifying sentiments shall go into the opposite 
scales of the balance in deliberation, and in what forms, 
gross or refined, they shall show themselves, will depend 
partly upon the native capacity of the mind, its natural 
heritages and aptitudes, and partly upon the degree and 
character of its development. In the young child and in the 
savage, present desire passes instantly into action, because 
it is not confronted by opposing desires derived from past 
experience and laid by in the mind, ready to be kindled into 
restraining or modifying activity ; in the man of large and 
much meditative understanding, desire maybe so neutralised 
by the many desires brought into deliberation as that 
resolution is ' sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,' 
and action paralysed. You shall sometimes see a man 
whose powerful reason has grasped all the relations, weighed 



THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 61 

all the circumstances, and forecasted all the issues of events 
exactly, fixed nevertheless in hesitating impotence to act, 
because he is in the hapless plight of having no inferior 
powers to execute the decrees of judgment. 

If one wished to present an instance of a supposed and 
seeming operation of cool intelligence untinctured by desire, 
and to observe it in its deep actual relation to the natural 
passions of human nature, one might be tempted to select 
the appreciation of some purely scientific theory. Here, 
surely, there is no necessity for the elimination of personal 
prejudice, no mixture of passion to prevent a clear and 
sincere apprehension of it, no room for envy, no cloud of 
feeling to dim the white light of the understanding, nothing 
but a calm and pure love of truth ! Alas ! this is an ideal 
vision. Self-love is at work as a powerful factor ; it operates 
so deeply, intimately, and unconsciously that the intellect 
cannot act freely even with the best intentions, feeling its 
backward pull when it goes against it, its forward push 
when it goes with it. A clear and cold love of truth, a 
passionless serenity of reason, will not withstand it. Reason 
must be beguiled, or bribed, or ruled, without knowing it. 
In the best case one must oppose to it an enthusiasm for 
truth, which is truly passion into which self-love has been 
cleverly enticed, and so transformed as no longer to know 
itself. Now when we get to the depths of self-love in the 
attempt to fathom motives we strike upon those yet unex- 
plored strata of the constituents of mind that are contri- 
buted by the organic life. 

Let me go on now to supplement the foregoing example 
of motives in apparent equilibrium by the presentation of 
another example, in which the scales are very unequally 
weighted, and deliberation therefore is a very swift affair : 
an infant on the verge of toddling over a precipice and a 
humane person standing by with the power to interpose and 
save it. There is no balancing of motives then. Theoreti- 
cally, the man has the choice of two courses — to do or not 
to do anything ; but practically the will is constrained to 
such instant action one way, by the sudden unloosing of 
human sympathies in him on the touch of the fit occasion, 



62 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

that it has not the least power to incline to the opposite 
course. His act of rescue is instant and instinctive, no less 
essentially, though more circuitously, reflex than the quick 
movement which he would make to save himself, were he 
himself on the point of falling over the precipice. Where, 
then, is the freedom of his will ? All its freedom lies in the 
power to do what it is constrained to do, as all liberty is the 
liberty that a thing free from constraint has to obey the 
necessity of its nature. Were sufficient time given for re- 
flection, there would be the opportunity of choosing the 
course of not stirring a step to save the child ; but could the 
humane man choose it ? We should not blame a dog which 
made no movement in like circumstances, because it has not 
the social nature in its mental constitution, and the occasion 
therefore unlocks no inward forces in it ; but if any human 
being did so, his conduct would, by the universal consent of 
mankind, be pronounced most extraordinary and unaccount- 
able, and stigmatised as unnatural and inhuman ; people 
would find it impossible to conceive the motive which could 
have actuated him. Were he to assign the freedom of the 
will as a sufficient explanation, consistently claiming for 
himself a freedom of will to think and feel as well as to 
act, he would be thought to add an insult to the under- 
standing of mankind to the outrage against its humanity. 
If he assigned as a good reason his conviction that the 
deaths of a great many children would be truly a blessing, 
inasmuch as there are far too many alive for whom to hope 
even a moderately happy existence, and still people go on 
begetting them recklessly, as they would take a pinch of 
snuff, without the smallest regard to anything but their 
own momentary gratification, he would be execrated as an 
inhuman monster, though all that he said might be soberly 
true. Were he to protest that he had not been actuated by 
'any motive, his assertion would be scouted with scorn, for it 
would be assumed that the very singularity of his conduct 
implied a very extraordinary motive. Madmen are the only 
persons who are allowed to act without motives, or at any 
rate without such motives as commend themselves to, and 
can be counted on by, sane persons. With the latter the 



THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 63 

necessity of motives to actuate the will, either as first agent 
in the series of processes that issue in it, or as one of the 
antecedents starting into clearer consciousness than the rest, 
is such that when they are not educed nor supplied by the 
occasion, and the decision hangs accordingly in suspense, 
recourse is had sometimes to lots or chance in order thus to 
obtain anyhow the preponderance of motive to act upon the 
will. I never yet heard of anybody who maintained that a 
penny showed freewill, because, when it was tossed into 
the air, he could not predict whether it would fall heads or 
tails uppermost. Everybody knows that it will fall with the 
one face or the other uppermost ; that the result, whatever 
it be, is a necessity, though a contingency; and that it 
would be no contingency, but foreseen as a certainty, if the 
size, shape and structure of the coin, the exact quality, 
measure, and direction of the force used in tossing it, and 
all the external conditions, were formulated in the proper 
complex problem, and that were worked out accurately. 

Between the two extreme instances adduced — the one, of 
vacillating irresolution in which reasons are balanced so 
evenly that the shadow of a motive suffices to turn the oscil- 
lating scale; the other, of instant determination where a 
moment's deliberation is excluded — a multitude of instances 
might be brought forward to illustrate every step of a grada- 
tional transition from the one to the other. One instance 
more may suffice here : that of two persons placed in circum- 
stances of temptation as nearly alike as possible, who act 
quite differently ; two men passionately in love and in inti- 
mate intercourse with the objects of their affection, the one 
of whom yields recklessly to the temptation of seduction, 
while the other does not. Will any one soberly maintain 
that these persons had the same strength of passion, the 
same power of choice, the same freedom of will ? Or can 
any one suppose seriously that the virtuous person was not 
actuated by strong motives of prudence or conscience in his 
successful stand against the urgent temptation ? The will, 
— or preferring facts to phrases, let us say the man — was not 
less determined in the one case than in the other; in the 
one his freedom was in doing, in the other it was in not 



64 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

doing, but in both it was in acting according to the motives 
which urged him — that is to say, in not being vicious when 
his will was virtuously motived, and in not being virtuous 
when it was viciously motived. Character and motives 
being what they were, the virtuous man was not free to be 
vicious, nor the vicious man free to be virtuous. It is not 
likely that any one would care to question or dispute this in 
the particular case, especially if, in order to make the ex- 
ample stronger, we suppose the vicious man to have been 
little higher than an idiot, and the virtuous man little lower 
than an angel ; he may like better to suppose the case of a 
person who has succumbed to temptation on one occasion, 
but who withstands it on another similar occasion. Herein 
he sees proof that he might have resisted successfully on the 
first occasion. 

But there is no such proof. What is proved is that the 
person has done differently when he and the circumstances, 
although very nearly, were not quite, the same. It is not 
possible to have a recurrence of the same, or to suppose 
the recurrence of exactly similar, circumstances to the 
same person, and so to test the will's freedom by the de- 
monstration of its power to act differently in them; the 
circumstances and events are necessarily different on the 
second occasion ; they are a recurrence — that is, the occur- 
rence of circumstances as exactly similar as possible plus 
the experience of the first occasion. That difference in the 
antecedents suffices to make the difference in the conse- 
quence. On both occasions the individual does that which 
pleases him best at the moment, choosing, if he chooses ill, 
the semblance of good; for he and the occasions are dif- 
ferent. Moreover, without the superadded antecedent made 
by the precedent experience, there might easily be manifold 
differences in the antecedent and constituent elements of the 
volition, imperceptible or unperceived either by himself or 
by others. His passion may have had less force by reason 
of different physiological conditions of which he was un- 
conscious; his reflection may have had a little freer play 
because of the mitigation of his passion ; the . susceptibility 
of sense, or the rate of conduction in nerve-fibres, may have 



THE POSITIVE ASSUKANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 65 

been a little lowered by a lower temperature of them, or by 
other causes, so that the message came ever so little later, 
or with ever so little less urgency. 1 His mistress may have 
said or done some trivial thing which stirred ever so little 
revulsion of feeling at the critical moment; a look, a gesture, 
a whiff of odour, a tone of her voice may have struck and 
diverted his attention at the instant, or have been a dis- 
cordant jar in the tension of his high-strung feeling and 
produced a revulsion thereof; some seemingly small thing in 
him or in her, impinging on one sense or other and affect- 
ing the organic tone, would be enough to make the circum- 
stances and the result different. And in every nature the 
mood or feeling is a deeper fact than the thoughts and fan- 
cies, and has a greater influence upon thought and conduct. 
Reflect how slight an impression — the glance of a woman, or 
the tone of her voice — moves a man to the depths of his being, 
thrilling through every fibre of him ; and moves him in that 
way at one time, when his body is in a certain physiological 
tone, while it has no effect at another time and in another 
state of body. Has it not happened sometimes, in an inter- 
view with another person, that we have said what we had re- 
solved beforehand not to say, or have not said what we had 
resolved beforehand to say ; not from anything said by him 
directly to provoke or to check the utterance, but because a 
tone of voice, a gesture, a shade of expression, something, 
however little — we know not perhaps what — vibrating through 
the inmost mental recesses, has sufficed to loosen a spring or 
to repress one 9 A sensation that is so slight as seemingly to 
be petty and indifferent will assuredly act sometimes in a far- 
reaching and surprising way to excite or to inhibit. 

The same individual in the same circumstances or acted 

1 When a stimulus acts upon a nerve, there is an appreciable period 
between the application of the stimulus and the nerve's response to it, which 
period of ' latent stimulation ' is known physiologically as the ' excitatory 
stage.' This period is measurably longer when the temperature of the nerve 
is lowered, and during it the nerve is insusceptible to stimulus. In like manner 
the rate of conduction in a nerve is lowered by a low temperature. And does 
not cold benumb thought and freeze passion? It is not likely that Newton 
would have thought out the law of gravitation had he lived near the North 
Tole. 



66 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

upon by the same motives — is a conception which an ideal 
philosophy possessed of an omniscience of self will alone 
dare to entertain ; since a philosophy which took an account 
of the complex facts could never hope to comprehend and 
appraise the individual in that exact way. An accidental 
and passing occasion shall bring back distinctly into sudden 
illumination, without a perceptible connection, some remote 
event which otherwise we should have forgotten for ever. It 
was there, though we knew it not, but where? And if 
somewhere in our inmost being, not dead but sleeping, latent 
but not patent, when we know not of its existence, how 
estimate its influence by any self -inspection or psychological 
intuition ? It happens to us frequently to recollect a par- 
ticular conversation or event in the remote past because it 
made a deep impression upon us at the time, and yet to 
forget numberless other impressions that really exercised a 
more deep and lasting influence while we thought not of 
them. Consider, for example, the very positive effects on 
character that are produced insensibly by the circumstances 
of the particular circle of society in which we live ; we are 
not aware of the modification which we undergo ; but if we 
enter a new social circle, or return to an old one, it is 
revealed to us, by the instant pleasures or aversions which 
we feel, how gradually and silently our character has 
been modified. Perhaps we have longed to go back to a 
former manner of life which is surrounded in memory with 
a halo of enjoyment, during several years spent in another 
and quite different sort of life, eagerly promising ourselves 
the renewal of former delights ; but how sadly and some- 
times ludicrously disappointing is the experiment, if we 
make it ! We discover with dismay that our feelings and 
judgments are different ; that we are entirely changed, 
though we knew it not ; that our self-inspection has com- 
pletely failed us, and our self-consciousness completely 
deluded us ; and we hasten to escape from the scenes that 
we had so ardently longed to revisit and from the experi- 
ences that we had hoped to repeat. Growing to his modes of 
impression and exercise, as in his subordinate motor so in 
his higher mental functions, the individual feels as little at 



THE POSITIVE ASSUKANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 67 

home in an old circle which he thus re-enters as he does 
when he returns to practise a difficult exercise of bodily 
skill that he had relinquished for years. 

It is impossible for any one who has not made a diligent 
study of the physiology of the body to appreciate the many 
and various influences which continually work upon the 
mind, and the divers subtile ways, direct and indirect, in 
which they work, to determine its moods, feelings, and 
impulses — to trace back to their origin the roots of the 
factors that go to make motives and to discover the intricate, 
circuitous, and far-reaching inhibitions and impulsions, the 
weakenings and invigorations, to which they are exposed 
both in formation and function. He apprehends only that 
which is within the light of consciousness, whereas these 
are outside it, below its threshold, insensible, a complex 
composition of intricate forces that is known only or mainly 
in the result. It is probable that a study of the light- 
bearing experiments and discoveries of Claude Bernard 
respecting the functions of the sympathetic system of nerves 
and the intimate phenomena of life, might yield him more 
insight into that matter than all the disquisitions of philo- 
sophers can ever do ; at any rate, without such adequate 
conception of facts, as the foundation of his enterprise, he is 
ill furnished to make a fruitful study of mental functions, 
and well fitted to continue in barren and futile discussions. 

Is it not an inexhaustible wonder that any one should 
think to divorce mind-functions from the body to which they 
are inseparably united, should deal with them as the pro- 
perties of an abstraction called a non-bodily self, and should 
maintain that they may be studied adequately from a purely 
internal station? A singular philosophy, indeed, which 
aspires to measure and appraise impulses of will springing 
out of the passion of sexual love, without giving the least 
thought to the existence of sexual organs and the essential 
influence which they and their differing states exercise in de- 
termining, not only the very quality of sensibility, but the 
specific nature and strength of the passion and of its motor 
outcomes ! It would be curious to see explained from the 
moral data of pure psychology the changes of mood and the 



68 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

violent outbreaks of temper that occur in an elephant, hitherto 
invariably good and gentle, after it has undergone the phy- 
sical changes of puberty ; or to observe what place religion, 
poetry, and morality had in the pure and abstract mental 
philosophy of a sexually emasculated mankind. The meta- 
physical psychologist — who for a long time maintained that 
all men had naturally equal capacities of intelligence, the 
inequalities of their actual understandings being ascribed to 
differences of culture on their part, and who still maintains 
for the most part that all men are equally capable of good 
naturally, and might be equally good actually if they so willed 
it — would be content to imagine the stomach, liver, or heart 
of one person transplanted into the body of another person 
in the place of its own organs, in the confident assurance 
that it would make no difference in his character; or, 
perhaps, to imagine the brain of one new-born infant taken 
out and put into the skull of another, in the full conviction 
that ancestral heritages would not hinder the one from being 
just as good, and doing just as well, as the other. 

In reality the psychologist would be much nearer the 
truth were he to assert a difference in mind in every case, 
human or animal, in which he observed a difference of body. 
Could one imagine the paws of a lion fixed to the ends of 
the legs of a sheep in the place of its own feet, we should 
justly look for a correlative change of character in the sheep ; 
not at once, if the organic transplantation were a recent ex- 
periment, because some time must elapse for the foot to 
obtain its proper representation in the sheep's brain; but 
when in full time the innermost and the outermost had been 
brought into accord, the brain into correlation with the foot, 
then the sheep's character would certainly be mightily 
changed. The animal would not be converted into a lion, 
it is true, because it is the whole organisation of the lion, 
not a part only, that makes its ferocious character, and it is 
the brain which expresses it, as containing in innermost 
representation and in due co-ordination all the characters of 
the outermost ; but the sheep would be no longer a sheep, 
its character would be entirely changed ; it would, in fact, 
be a new animal, morally as well as physically. 



THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 69 

It were much to be wished that the philosophers of the 
study would consider frankly and loyally the instance of a 
weak and timid animal whose urgent instinct is to save 
itself from its natural enemies by instant flight, but which, 
when it has young ones, faces its dreaded enemy and engages 
in a desperate and absurdly hopeless battle in their defence. 
It assuredly does not stay to reason either when it flies or 
when it fights ; for in either case it acts in obedience to its 
predominant impulse or instinct. But how has this very re- 
markable transformation of nature been brought about? 
By maternal affection obviously ; out of which feeling has 
sprung the impulse that preponderates over its strong natural 
impulse to save itself by flight. In the one case it perceives 
intensely — feels vividly rather than perceives definitely 
perhaps — its enemy and nothing else, its consciousness 
being concentrated in the perception, feeling and action asso- 
ciated with that vividly active nerve-centre, and other 
consciousnesses being inhibited ; in the other case, it perceives 
or feels intensely its young and their danger, its conscious- 
ness being concentrated in that group of perceptions, feeling 
and conduct, and other consciousnesses being inhibited. 
Like one in an ecstasy, or like a hypnotic person, it is 
absorbed in a circumscribed psychical activity, the rest of its 
mind being inactive. There is no conscious reasoning in 
the matter, no advised action, no deliberate determination of 
will, nothing more than different feeling and different action 
springing instantly from changed bodily conditions. It is an 
organic machine that is put into the two different frantic 
actions by two different springs. Is there any mental philo- 
sophy which can give the least explanation of the new 
motives that occasion so new and brave a will, one too which 
is so entirely alien from the ordinary timid nature of the 
creature? Philosophy has been in face of the fact since its 
own birth unto now without getting any further than the 
discovery that it acts from mstinct — that is to say, that it 
acts so because it is in it to do so. Is it any better mental 
philosophy which, ignoring the not less powerful bodily 
causes that affect man's moods of will, discusses them as 
qualities of pure abstractions ? To have any understanding 



70 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

in the matter we must substitute for the metaphysical notion 
of a mental unity the physiological conception of a con- 
federation of nerve-centres, that are severally in intimate 
relation with the various organs and specialised functions of 
the body, and endeavour by patient observation and experi- 
ment to find out and to set forth the special correlations 
between the distant parts and the innermost nerve-centres. 

It is as easy as it is puerile and profitless to prove the 
undetermined nature of an energy by excluding arbitrarily 
from the problem all consideration of the most important 
determining conditions, as those necessarily do who begin 
by enforcing the adequacy of a method of introspective 
inquiry which cannot possibly take account of them, and by 
rejecting the method of inquiry which alone can give an 
account of them. It is to carry the pleasant comedy a little 
further to put an abstraction in the place of these excluded 
real energies, and to invoke its agency as an all-sufficient expla- 
nation ; thus, as always, the apt word being made to do duty 
for the lacking idea. The particular volition is an act of, or 
caused by, the will ; the will is not caused by anything but 
itself; the former we may observe and deal with practically, 
as we do with other forms of energy, the latter is super- 
natural and known only by intuition : all the changing 
volitions of daily life, bettering or worsening as we advance 
in years, strong in health and weak in sickness, infantile in 
the child and imbecile in idiocy, inspired in the man of 
genius and common-place in common-place people, brutally 
vigorous in some practical men and weak and impulsive in 
most women, always fluctuating, never exactly the same, in 
quality and energy in the same individual ; — all these are 
caused by the will ; they vary infinitely in power and quality, 
but it changes not in its essence ; they acknowledge time, 
place, and conditions, but it is serene above time, place, and 
conditions. Why meanwhile they should change so much 
in the individual when they have an unchanging cause does 
not clearly appear. If it be perchance owing to the imper- 
fections and the varying states of the instruments or organs 
through which they are constrained to manifest themselves, 
then one cannot well see how its subjection to imperfect 



THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 71 

instruments can fail to weigh heavily upon the freedom of the 
will in all the manifestations of its energy, or what ad- 
vantage it is to have a freewill which cannot ever manifest 
itself freely ; or how we contrive entirely to escape from the 
entangling fetters of the inadequate instrument when we get 
the self-conscious intuition of its absolute freedom. 



SECTION V. 

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OP CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 

Theke is hardly any one to be met with now-a-days who holds 
strictly and consistently to the belief that mind can work in 
the exercise of its function without a brain, at any rate in 
this world. While making this general concession, however, 
many people do actually in their inmost minds, if not in 
outward declaration, make reservation or exception of the 
particular functions of will ; or rather perhaps, as with many 
persons is not unusual, believe vaguely the general proposi- 
tion and the particular contradiction at the same time, 
without acknowledging or even perceiving any inconsistency 
in themselves. Some of them, if they were pressed closely 
to answer definitely and lucidly concerning a matter which 
they prefer to leave hazy and indefinite, might admit that 
the power of choosing, in which lies the freedom of will, goes 
along with some sort of cerebral action, antecedent, contem- 
poraneous, or instantly sequent. That knowledge is not got 
by introspection ; for consciousness, which cannot even tell 
us that we have a brain, is certainly not capable of making 
known the different brain-changes that go along with its 
manifold affections. If emotio mentis means commotio cerebri, 
as we have the best reason to believe it does, the emotion 
itself does not give the least hint of the cerebral agitation, 
though other bodily disturbances do. From the commotion 
of feeling itself we could not derive the smallest suspicion 
of a subjacent molecular explosion. 



72 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

The odd thing is that from this admitted incompetence of 
consciousness to testify concerning what it is not its function 
to observe, we are required to draw the nowise legitimate 
conclusion of its essential independence of brain. Instead of 
drawing what seems the sober and natural conclusion that 
consciousness has no authority to declare whether its states 
are the consequences of brain-states or not — as they clearly 
may be for anything it has to say one way or the other in the 
matter— we are to see in its ignorance the absolute certitude 
that they are not ; not otherwise than as if we were asked to 
accept from a man without smell the testimony that a rose 
was scentless, or to be satisfied with the evidence of a person 
who should declare that the rose had no smell because he 
could not see its perfume, or protest that it was not red 
because he could not smell its colour. As the inquirer tests 
the authority of the man without smell by comparing it with 
the testimonies of other persons who can smell, and so proves 
the failure to be not in the rose but in him ; and as he tests 
the evidence or want of evidence of one sense by comparing 
it with the evidence of other senses ; so he should test the 
authority of introspective consciousness by comparing it with 
the evidence of those other methods of observation which 
have convinced him that he has a brain and that changes in 
it move parallel with changes of consciousness. It may 
come to pass in the process of time that these intimate and 
hidden workings of the brain shall be watched from without, 
and their exact correspondences with changes of thought 
and feeling noted, and they perhaps measured by some 
exceeding delicate psychometer; but even when that has 
come to pass, if it ever do — when that which appeals now 
secretly to consciousness is then known openly to sense — 
consciousness will still be as far as ever from giving the least 
hint of them. That fact will not be superadded testimony 
to its independence of matter and to its spiritual sufficiency ; 
it will only add to the strength of the proof of its incom- 
petence as a witness in the matter. 

Let it be granted, for the sake of the argument, that 
consciousness is in some unknown way the direct effect of 
intimate cerebral action, one could not then logically expect 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 73 

it to reveal and declare by direct intuition the material energy 
that caused it. For what else would that be but to demand 
that consciousness should in the moment of intuition be itself 
and its molecular antecedents — the effect and the cause at 
one and the same instant ? Consciousness lives only in the 
instant and cannot go back in direct intuition to its most 
proximate antecedent; and to go back to its material ante- 
cedent would be to go back to that which is not it, but its 
cause. Like a muscular contraction, which is a series of 
shocks or waves following one another so rapidly as to appear 
continuous, consciousness is a series of instants of con- 
sciousness so rapid as to seem continuous. Its failure to 
testify in that matter is no more proof of its independence 
of material cause than the failure of an individual's self- 
consciousness to reveal to him that his self is anywise de- 
pendent upon a grandfather is proof that he could ever have 
come into being without a grandfather. Already it has 
been shown that the first obscure sentiment that any one 
experiences, the most primitive manifestation of his con- 
sciousness, whatever that be, presupposes in the constitu- 
tional structure of his body all humanity that has gone 
before : does self-consciousness tell him aught of that mo- 
mentous experience or even give the smallest hint of it? 

When we experience a state of consciousness that we are 
not able to refer to an exciting cause, as we refer the sensa- 
tion of sound to the external body, we invent a faculty as 
the cause of it ; for example, when we feel an emotion, we 
are conscious of no material cause of it, and we accordingly 
imagine an emotional faculty as part of the furniture of 
mind, as we in like manner refer an outcoming volition to a 
faculty of will. All the while there are perhaps sufficient 
physical antecedents of the emotion and will in the states of 
the internal organs of the body that are hidden from us ; 
but having no perceptions of these organic affections, we 
please ourselves with the mental faculties which we create and 
put in their places. There is no one who does not think 
a smell or a taste to be more essentially subjective, more 
intimately mental, than a sight or sound, because its cause 
is less gross and palpable, more subtile and latent ; indeed, 
6 



74 WILL IN ITS JMETAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

so seemingly objective are the latter senses that had we 
possessed them only, and no higher mental life than the 
sensations which they furnish, it may be questioned whether 
we should ever have felt the need of inventing a spiritual 
mind at all. We know well now, however, that taste and 
smell are not more specially mental than sight and sound, 
because we have convinced ourselves by more exact observa- 
tions and larger experience that the sensations have their 
objective causes in the properties of special material 
substances. There remains to be done a like useful 
service for emotion and will : a service not to be successfully 
done for a long time to come— first, because they are rooted 
in the organic life, the intimate, intricate, and manifold 
affections of which, and their essential relations with cerebral 
functions, are hardly known at all ; secondly, because the 
conditions of emotional sensibility in the brain, the different 
categories or forms of human feeling and will, represent the 
structuralised experiences of an indefinitely long line of 
ancestors; and, thirdly, because in accordance with that fact 
their natural stimuli are social, in any and every emotion 
the energies of a complex social involution in structure being 
unlocked by the fitting social stimulus. As we now perceive 
plainly that the uniformities of our notions of the external 
world are due to the uniform operations of our senses, so 
when we have attained to an accurate and exact knowledge 
of the material substrata of thought, feeling, and will, we 
shall perceive plainly that the uniformities of our feelings 
and passions are due to the uniform operations of the 
internal organs of the body upon the historically structu- 
ralised brain. 

Meanwhile, the immediately urgent business of the 
serious and practical student of mind is to betake himself 
diligently to an earnest study of the body, in order to get 
clear and distinct conceptions of what it is organically, and 
what it can do and does habitually as an organic machine 
without extraneous help. Let him be as metaphysically 
minded as he will, his proper course is to undertake this 
pre-essential enterprise, postponing to its thorough accom- 
plishment the more aspiring studies of those things that are 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 75 

assumed to be beyond the capacities of physical agencies. 
Proceeding in that way to the study of the body with 
frank and open mind, he perceives that it is a physiological 
unity ; that the essential principle of its being and function 
is a principle of individuation ; that it is in fact unit and 
individual, an ego. It is the most perfect example in nature 
of an intimate and essential correlation of manifold diverse 
parts working together in the unity of the whole. There is 
no need then to rush to the conclusion that in the self- 
consciousness of the ego he has an intuitive revelation which 
excludes the possibility of a physical basis, lest haply he 
should otherwise be left without resource for his belief in 
the ego. He perceives next that the physiological unity, 
although changing its particles day by day and continually 
taking new developments in new circumstances, keeps its 
identity as long as it lives ; unlike as it may be at fifty 
years of age that which it was at five years of age, it is yet 
at fifty the development of that which it was at five, and 
bears in its nature ineffaceable traces of its sufferings and 
doings at that early period. It represents a principle of 
continuity or filiation, whereby the present is a development 
of the past, and not of the past of the individual only, but 
of the past of the kind ; for he is not merely one, but one 
with his kind, co-member with others of a common social 
body and all members one of another. Why, then, the hot 
haste to ascribe the consciousness of continuity to an 
intuition of identity which excludes the possibility of a 
physical basis and necessitates the instant appeal to an 
immaterial entity ? Self-consciousness shows itself in a bad 
way here ; for, isolating the individual mind as it needs must 
by its method, it breaks actual continuity with the past, 
yields no explanation of the inborn lines of thought and 
feeling, and shuts out all opening for any such inquiry. 
Were its method sufficient, the individual would have to be 
studied as a thing apart, having no connection with the 
past, no portion in the future ; but as he does not thus stand 
apart in nature, but has a part in it, we may without exag- 
geration say that the more self-sufficient it is as a method, 
the more inefficient it necessarily is. 



76 WILL IN ITS ]METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

Are not, in truth, the individual's conscious memories of 
his affections and acts far less complete and stable than the 
organism's registered memories of its affections and acts ? 
The former are transient and may be effaced, the latter are 
fixed and well-nigh ineffaceable. If identity had no better 
foundation than conscious memory, there is no one who 
would not lose continuous consciousness of it before he was 
thirty years old. Who in ripe manhood could persuade 
himself that he was the same self as when he was a little 
child, were his self-consciousness the only witness ? To recall 
to mind my sentiments, inclinations, and opinions at different 
epochs of life — so far as that is possible — remembering how 
well they pleased me at the time, and, comparing them with 
my present very different sentiments and inclinations, to 
reflect how ill they would please me now, must be to convince 
me that my present self is more unlike my former self than 
different persons are unlike each other ; indeed, to imagine 
myself confronted with myself at each of these different 
epochs would be to be confronted with so many individuals 
with whom I had little or no sympathy, nay perhaps to 
be actually affronted by them if they made a claim of near 
relationship ; and in the end I must needs feel very much 
obliged to my body for enabling me to preserve the conviction 
of my identity. I am only sure that I am myself by going back 
in memory through the succession of experiences which it 
has had in different situations and circumstances, and by 
linking together its pursuits, fortunes, and adventures. The 
consequence is that when I return after many years to visit 
a place in which a considerable part of my life was spent, I 
cannot realise how I felt and acted there, and can hardly realise 
that I ever lived there ; the piece of history seems to want 
reality, to be very much like a dream ; and the reason is that I 
am so much changed and that my changed identity cannot 
identify itself with the unchanged identity of the place. I 
am dependent really upon my memory of events and circum- 
stances, and I go back to the past scene therefore, not with 
the direct and vivid certainty of an intuitive consciousness, but 
with the dim and discontinuous consciousness with which I 
go back to a dream. Disease may sweep clean away my 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 7? 

consciousness of identity, notwithstanding that, though 
changed, I still am. 

If any one chooses to assure me that not a single particle 
of my body is what it was thirty years ago, and that its form 
has entirely changed since then ; that it is absurd therefore 
to speak of its identity ; and that it is absolutely necessary to 
suppose it to be inhabited by an immaterial entity which holds 
fast the personal identity amidst the shifting changes and 
chances of structure : — I answer him that other people who 
have known me from my youth upwards, but have not my 
self-conscious certainty of identity, are nevertheless as 
much convinced of it as I am, and would be equally sure of 
it even if, deeming me the greatest liar in the world, they 
did not believe a word of my subjective testimony ; that 
they are equally convinced of the personal identities of their 
dogs and horses whose self-conscious testimony goes for 
nothing in the matter ; and lastly, that admitting an imma- 
terial substance in me it must be admitted to have gone 
through so many changes that I am not sure the least 
immaterial particle of it is what it was thirty years ago ; 
that with the best intention in the world therefore I see not 
the least need of, nor get the least benefit from, the assumed 
and seemingly superfluous entity. It might indeed be right 
to go further, and in turn to assure him that his intuition 
of identity is really the explicit declaration of its physio- 
logical unity and identity which his body makes in con- 
sciousness ; and that to attribute to the mere translator the 
credit and authority of author, to the transcript the authority 
of the original, is to make a singularly ungrateful return for 
what he owes to the body. 

Those who speak of mind and consciousness as co-exten- 
sive and yet not having extension, as their wont is, and treat 
the notion of unconscious mind as a gross absurdity, should 
soberly explain where, during a particular conscious state, 
all the rest of the mind is ; where in fact all that furniture 
beyond the particular piece then in use is stored. Here is 
something that does not occupy space, that exists only so 
far as it is conscious, and which nevertheless on any occasion 
has not so much as the thousandth part of its being in con- 



78 WILL W ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

scious activity. Where is the non-active part of its being? 
Is it for the time being not in existence because it is not in 
consciousness ? Well might they say with St. Augustine, 
if they reflected as closely as he did upon the wonders of 
memory — ' Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself. 
And where should that be which containeth not itself? Is 
it without it, and not within ? how then doth it not com- 
prehend itself? ' 

The abstract notion of a metaphysical identity has para- 
lysed positive observation and occasioned an almost entire 
neglect of the concrete facts as they bear upon the subject 
of personal identity ; patent as the day, they have been as 
unseen as the stars when the sun is bright. The entity in- 
voked, there was an end of question and inquiry; even curi- 
osity was unborn and belief unquestioning, as from of old 
belief has always been most unquestioning in those domains 
of mystery which inquiry and question might not enter, 
where they were not even conceived as possible. Recoiling 
from the danger of intruding upon sacred ground, and from 
the hardly less deterrent difficulty of resolutely forming clear 
and definite ideas and expressing them in exact terms and 
phrases, men have persistently dealt with words instead of 
things, and with words as things. Had I the constant in- 
tuitive feeling of being the same, as I am metaphysically re- 
quired to have, I should not know that I was the same, any 
more than a person who lived always in one sensation could 
know that he had a sensation ; for is it not by feeling the 
changes or differences in myself that I know that I have a 
foundation of sameness — that I mark a continuity of de- 
velopment ? 

To say that memory has registered the successions of 
changes so that I am able to recur to them by its means, 
is not to make the smallest step forward in actual know- 
ledge; it is merely to transform a descriptive name into 
a faculty, and then to proceed to conjure with it. It is the 
body which registers the changes in its structure, not any 
abstract memory-entity, and the recurrence of the acti- 
vities in it is memory. It is no exaggeration to say that 
the memory of a series of events is never quite accurate and 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 79 

never exactly the same on two occasions, for the condition of 
self at the time of the recurrence in memory tinctures deeply 
the colours or qualities of the remembrance : the exact and 
perfect memory it is impossible to have. How deep and far- 
reaching too these changes of self! When a person minded 
to write a biography of himself sits down in mature age to 
describe the events and feelings and circumstances of his 
childhood, it is a romance, not a history, that he really com- 
poses ; as he himself plainly perceives if, after he has done 
his work, he chance to have the opportunity of comparing 
his story of the sorrows or joys of some important event in 
his career with a particular record of it written by himself 
at the time. Inflamed with the fire of youth, the individual 
walks with bead erect, confident and cheerfully defying des- 
tiny ; sobered and saddened by experience and age, the same 
individual bows in mind and body under it. Naturally, 
therefore, is the sentiment of freewill much stronger in 
youth and vigour than in age and feebleness ; for the desire 
to assert the self as against other selves and things, which is 
the essence of the sentiment, is no other than the self-con- 
servative instinct of life in its highest conscious expression ; 
passionate and confident therefore in youth, more deliberate 
and diffident in age. Whoso is suffering pain has a less vivid 
sentiment of freewill than he has when he is enjoying plea- 
sure, for in the one case he is undergoing a repression, in 
the other case an expansion, of self. See, again, how great 
a transformation of the ego is produced by the oppression of 
disease ! He whose brain is exhausted by overwork becomes 
impatient, irritable, acrid, and above all things wishful for 
rest. At the same time, his tastes, sentiments, judgments, 
and volitions are changed: he takes no pleasure in that 
which formerly and ordinarily gave him pleasure ; is critical, 
captious, and full of offence ; has no confidence in his own 
judgments, which it is a pain to him to form, and well-nigh 
an impossibility to express ; feels no animation of hope or 
aim, and is destitute alike of energy to wish or will. His 
friends who know him well, seeing that he is no longer 
himself, make allowance for him, not minding what he says 
when he speaks bitterly to them ; and he himself, when he 



80 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

recovers from his prostration , looks back in shame and amaze- 
ment on the transformed being that he was. 

The ego is not a constant but a variable. It represents 
the aggregate of sensations clearly or obscurely felt at any 
given moment, whether springing from the original consti- 
tution or from the acquired nature and habits of the organ- 
ism ; these sensations themselves representing the sum of 
silent multitudes of activities that are going on below the 
threshold of consciousness, and which, albeit unperceived 
and unfelt immediately, vibrate subtilely in the most intimate 
and intricate interactions of organic depths, and in the result 
affect deeply the tone of consciousness. One may take leave 
to doubt whether the holiest saint could preserve in his de- 
votion the most serene and sacred tone of spiritual feeling, 
if one or two of his disordered viscera were propagating act- 
ively a succession of discordant vibrations to their represent- 
ative territories in the brain, or whether the most subtile 
and exalted intuition of consciousness into the mysteries of 
the inner being could triumph over the discordant jars of a 
deranged liver. When the aggregate of vibrations that are 
distinctly above the threshold of consciousness is in harmony 
with the whole of the multitudinous vibrations at and below 
the threshold — when the strings, so to speak, of all the in- 
struments of the orchestra, both of the players in sight and 
of the players out of sight, are in unison — then the ego is 
whole, complete, harmonious. On the other hand, when 
that is not so, when the illumined energies are not in har- 
mony with the unillumined energies, the present state with 
the character, or when some especial discord prevails in the 
orchestra, then the ego is incomplete, partial, discordant ; 
the individual not at one with himself. Introspection itself, 
had it been thorough and faithful, might have opened this 
field of inquiry, but here again the all-sufficient abstract ego 
stood like a forbidding angel in the way of patient and plod- 
ding inquiry, and precluded all fruitful study of the nature 
and affections of the real ego. 

It is a favourite axiom of the metaphysician that the ego 
has not extension and is not divisible, its definition being 
made out of blank negations of these positive qualities; 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 81 

but it is an axiom which after all is confronted, if not confuted, 
by evidence which goes far to show, if we examine it fairly, 
that the ego has extension and is divisible. Here, indeed, 
may be noted a very pretty inconsistency on his part : while 
telling us that space is essentially a form of thought, innate 
in the ego, he assures us in the same breath that the ego 
has not extension ; in other words, that which has not ex- 
tension thinks extension by virtue of its innate form. Mean- 
while may it not actually be because the ego has extension 
that it can and does think space in every act of consciousness 
— in every thought and feeling, as well as in every percep- 
tion — and that, as will be seen later, it is capable of disinte- 
gration by disease ? Another consideration : Those who 
protest so much that mind has not extension, would do well 
to explain clearly whether every sensation, as such, is not a 
function of pure consciousness. It is impossible for them 
seriously to dispute it. But it is certain that every sensation 
takes place through an extended part of the body, and 
though not itself material, is quantitative and qualitative ; 
that it must have that foundation in extension, and be felt 
somewhere in definite, even measurable degree, and of 
definite quality. Here, then, we have mind in its capacity of 
sensation taking on the qualities of extension. Lastly, let 
us consider this : That the moment an individual has said to 
himself I — whether as I feel, or as I think, or I am — he has 
enunciated his own limitation. The very consciousness of 
the ego is the betrayal of its limitation in time and space, 
and the proof of its extension ; for it is impossible for him 
to say I without positing a non-ego from which he is defined 
by limitation. So it turns out that the fundamental fact of 
consciousness is itself the most absolute declaration that the 
ego has extension. Certainly, if that be so, it will not lessen 
the trouble of comprehending how the finite, having form 
and occupying space, can declare itself to be made in the 
image of the Infinite, which is without form and does not 
occupy space. 

Our introspective psychologist of the study, who specu- 
lates at his ease about an abstract will that has only a 
notional existence, which accommodates itself pliantly to his 



82 WILL m ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

needs and moods of thought ; meddling not with the various, 
far from readily conforming, concrete volitions that are the 
real existences with wnich practical psychologists and men 
of the world have to do ; cannot ever be brought to apprehend 
adequately the divers insensible conditions of body that 
make themselves felt as essential elements in the feelings, 
judgments and volitions of the individual. Could he do so, 
he would not fail to perceive that suicide and self-sacrifice 
are equally instances of a person's doing that which pleases 
him at the time ; that which, being most agreeable to or 
agreeing most with the then inclinations of his nature, seems 
to him best to choose. * Did ever any one/ asks Bishop 
Butler, e act otherwise than as he pleased ? ' 1 On different 
occasions I have talked freely and argued vainly with persons 
who, entertaining the notion of suicide, have subsequently 
carried it into effect, some of them having gone through a 
vast amount of previous suffering in their struggles to with- 
stand the deep inclinations of their natures ; and I have not 
seen reason to entertain the least doubt that, in yielding 
obedience thereto, they acted otherwise than as they pleased. 
You will say perhaps that they were mad and not therefore 
to be reckoned valid and useful instances. To that I answer 
that, even if they were mad, they were not on that account 
outside the range of a philosophy whose stern concern is 
with the solidities of facts : secondly, that, so far from being 
mad, some of them were a3 calm, cool and rational as any one 
I ever talked with ; too rational in fact, having too great a 
preponderance of intellect over desire to live happily in 
illusion : lastly, that those of them who were mad afforded 
by their disorder the best proofs of the determination of the 
likings and volitions by bodily causes. 

In the full strength of buoyant health and bodily energy 
a person delights in active exercise, even when he has no 
other purpose in the exercise than the expenditure of energy ; 
he is sure he is making a free choice, because he is doing that 
which his organisation prompts most strongly and has most 
pleasure in. What more repugnant to him then, more sad- 
dening, than the thoughts of inactivity and death ? But why 
1 In his second sermon on ' Human Nature.' 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 83 

is he not disquieted and sad because lie cannot fly, which 
would plainly be the freest and best exercise if he could take 
it? Indeed, we may well imagine the eagle, as it wings its 
swift way high in the heavens, and discerns with piercing 
eye, itself invisible to them, the little creatures creeping 
painfully about on the ground far below it, being struck with 
a wondering pity for them, or with pitying wonder that they 
can have a sufficient sense of pleasure to go on living in so 
sadly maimed a way. Man's body not having been so con- 
stituted as to enable him to fly does not inspire his mind 
with the desire to fly, and accordingly he envies not the 
eagle, nor ever thinks his freedom of will thwarted because 
he cannot choose or will to fly. Nor does he disquiet himself 
in vain because he has not a third eye at the back of his 
head, although he would manifestly see a great deal more of 
the world if he had it. In all things, great and small, his 
desires and volitions bear the impress and limitations of his 
bodily structure and state, just as do the desires and volitions 
of each kind of animal. The tiger would not wish and will 
to tear with tooth and claw, if tooth and claw were not con- 
stituent parts of it : the feline structure of body, animal or 
human, bespeaks a feline nature of mind. 

In the feebleness and decrepitude of age, in the hour of 
mortal sickness, in the shadow of approaching death, how 
repugnant the notion of activity ! How little repugnant, 
nay how welcome oftentimes, the idea of death ! Leave me 
at peace, let me rest, is the instinctive cry, the prayer of 
the expiring powers. As the bodily hold on life relaxes 
with the failure of the energies of the tissues, the mental 
hold is loosened also, until the near extinction of life is the 
extinction of all desire to live. A man has never so little 
appetite for immortality as when he is just putting off mor- 
tality. The horror of death is not the horror of the dying 
man in fear of his own annihilation, but the horror of the 
living friends around him at his annihilation for them ; who, 
moreover, being themselves in full life and vigour, revolt 
instinctively against the repugnant notion of ceasing to be. 
Nothing is more remarkable than the complete indifference 
to life commonly evinced at the near approach of death ; 



84 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

nothing more hard to conceive in the full vigour of life than 
the possibility of ever being indifferent to it. The judgment 
of the ego in each case is the bodily judgment. 

It is the first duty of the sincere student of mind to 
emancipate himself from the bad theological fashion of 
despising the body, and to endeavour to gain and hold just 
conceptions of its admirable structure and functions. There 
is mighty little nobility in the spectacle of a soul scorning its 
earthly tenement as long as it is united to it, and clinging to 
it with a miserable tenacity, desperately unwilling to leave it, 
when the time comes for the inevitable separation. Let him 
cease to be blind to himself and to things as they are, and 
keen- eyed to see himself as he is not, and he will then put his 
mind into that open and candid disposition in which he will 
be able to apprehend things truly as they are and to reason 
rightly of them. Before all things let him undertake a 
frank and searching inquiry into what the body can do by 
itself, giving to purely reflex acts and instinct their natural 
interpretations ; that is to say, not reading the higher into 
the lower, consciousness into reflex function or mind into 
instinct, still less making of instinct some mysterious, quasi- 
divine impulse, but drawing from the phenomena of instinct 
and reflex action the simple and natural physical lesson of 
what the body can do, since that is what they do prove ; not 
seeking the first blind and tentative efforts of an immaterial 
substance in the operations of matter, but discovering in the 
functions of highly organised matter the beginning of those 
phenomena of intelligent adaptation which, in their highest 
conscious expressions, are thought to necessitate the hypo- 
thesis of an immaterial agency. He may then perceive 
that instinct is misread and perhaps undervalued in some of 
its manifestations, and that intelligence is habitually over- 
valued in its essential signification. 

Two errors are in common vogue in regard to instinct : 
first, that it never errs ; secondly, that it never adapts itself 
to changed circumstances. In reality it does both ; on the 
one hand, it errs when in changed circumstances, not 
changing to them, it performs old acts that are obsolete, 
and, on the other hand, it does sometimes make imperfect 



THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 85 

and tentative adaptations to changed circumstances. As 
regards intelligence too, it is quite certain that nine-tenths 
of a man's daily acts that were originally intelligent and 
now seem voluntary are not really voluntary, but automatic. 
The same complex mechanism is used for their performance, 
whether it be put in action by a command of the will or by a 
stimulus of another sort, as we observe when any one shuts 
his eyes voluntarily, and at another time shuts them in- 
voluntarily on the occasion of a local irritation or of a 
threatening gesture, and in a thousand similar examples; 
and therefore it is that such actions are habitually and 
tacitly supposed to be voluntary by one who, observing 
them, thinks of himself as an essentially conscious being. 
Meanwhile, after they have become thoroughly fixed and 
habitual they are not voluntary ; the will is not required even 
to start them ; the least excitation will do that ; the difficulty 
indeed sometimes is to prevent them, the will being called 
upon to do so and perhaps failing. 

Here then are actions precisely alike in complex and 
purposive nature; we call them instinctive or reflex, and 
pronounce them to be bodily, when we know not that con- 
scious intelligence has preceded them in the order of de- 
velopment; we think them something quite different, and 
ascribe them to an immaterial entity, when we have watched 
the process of conscious adaptation that has gone before 
them. What they really prove is this — and it is the right 
lesson to be learnt from them — that the so-called intelligent 
design and execution of an act neither implies the existence 
of a pre-designing consciousness nor requires the interven- 
tion of any extra-physical agency in the individual organism ; 
that they are examples of what the body can do by itself in 
virtue of its constitution as a complex organic mechanism. 
The unconscious is the fundamental and active element, the 
conscious the concomitant and indicative; and the aim of 
true scientific inquiry must be to find out and set forth how 
much is essential, and how much or how little the incidental 
has for its part in the functions ; not to seek for the origin 
of the operations of matter in any form of consciousness, 
with which they can notably dispense, but rather to seek for 



86 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

the origin of consciousness in the highest operations of 
matter, with which it notably cannot dispense. At any rate 
this axiom should sink deep and be held fast in the mind — 
that the purposive nature of an act does not involve of 
necessity a pre-designing consciousness ; that matter does 
not get purpose from consciousness, whether or not it be 
that consciousness gets it from matter. 

Suppose that the inquirer who proceeds in this fashion 
ends by ascribing to matter all the grandeur and glories of 
mind : has he really affected in the least the moral meaning 
of his own nature ? He has glorified and aggrandised the 
functions of matter, and they in the end are just as mysterious 
and incomprehensible to him as mind. If he is honest with 
himself he cannot help confessing that any conception of 
spirit which he entertains is either an indefinite negation of 
matter, and therefore no actual conception at all, or really 
the conception of an exceedingly subtilised matter. A 
fundamental postulate he must have, whether it be molecule 
or mind ; and it is a question of words rather than of things 
whether he chooses to spiritualise matter or to materialise 
mind. He recoils from a material conception, however 
refined, though it is in the order of all his other conceptions 
of nature, and clings to an indefinite spiritual conception, 
mainly because of an instinctive aversion to lose his conscious 
individuality ; for in the full energy of conscious life he 
cannot bring himself to realise the possibility of its extinc- 
tion with the death of the body. Nor does the revolting 
and humiliating spectacle of the corruption of the body 
after its death, as it undergoes the process of decomposi- 
tion into simple elements, tend in any way to lessen that 
hindrance to a successful glorification of matter. Meanwhile, 
there are not wanting persons in different parts of the earth 
— in the enlightened as well as in the dark places thereof — 
the destruction of whose individualities he can contemplate 
with easy serenity, as there are doubtless many persons who 
in their turn can contemplate with equanimity the future 
destruction of his individuality. 



SECTION VI. 

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS. 

The foregoing exposition of some of the faults and fallacies 
in the foundations of the metaphysical doctrine of freewill 
ought, if itself sound, to prove that they are nowise so sound 
and surely laid in the testimony of consciousness as it has 
been assumed and asserted they are. In fact self-conscious- 
ness seems especially adapted to deceive us in that matter, 
both in respect of that which it omits to tell us and in 
respect of that which it does urgently tell us. As already 
explained, its capital omission is that it illumines directly 
the results, but does not illumine directly the causes, whence 
the natural illusion of an undetermined will ; its testimony 
is the testimony of its present affection, which, however, 
actually is the outcome of all the preceding affections of 
consciousness experienced by the individual and his fore- 
fathers. In that which it does directly tell us, on the other 
hand, there is a singularly forcible suggestion of inde- 
pendence. For in every voluntary determination there are 
certainly two elements : the consciousness of an energy or 
effort, and a distinct feeling of satisfaction in making the 
effort ; which last is probably the expression of the desire to 
assert self, in accordance with the fundamental instinct of 
self-conservation. 

The consciousness of effort is in truth a fundamental 
fact of experience; no explanation will ever enable us to 
get behind it; it springs from the relation of self to the 
not-self, their opposition and interaction, and is at once the 
revelation of their difference and identity. In the sense 
of effort there is involved necessarily a resistance, which is 
the basis of the belief of the non-ego. Were there an 
entire and perfect fitness of relations between the ego and 
the non-ego, a complete certitude in every respect, a full 
and exact harmony, consciousness would be extinguished. 
The consciousness of will may be said to mark the incom- 
pleteness and uncertainty of the relations. One surmounts 



88 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

self only by not thinking of self, coalesces with nature by a' 
complete self-surrender to the order thereof. Individuality 
is a passing severance from the larger life of nature, death- 
doomed therefore by its nature as a severed part. Could a 
man bring himself into complete harmony of relations with 
nature in every respect, mental and bodily, identify himself 
with it thoroughly, he might be immortal, but in that case 
he would secure immortality at the cost of individuality. 

The second constituent element of volition — namely, the 
distinct feeling of satisfaction attending it — is well adapted 
to inspire the individual with the conviction that he has 
willed and acted with perfect freedom : it is probably the 
main factor in that illusive consciousness. See how the 
drunkard, the madman, the passionately jealous or angry 
man, let his conduct be never so ridiculous, believes himself 
to be acting with entire freedom so long as his mood or 
passion lasts ; he has at the moment so distinct a feeling of 
satisfaction in what he does that he never felt more sure of 
his freedom; but when his passion cools or his mood 
changes he perceives clearly that, swayed or constrained by 
it, he was nowise so free as he imagined. His gesticulations 
and fury were not, as he flattered himself, triumphs of re- 
sistance to constraint and proud proofs of his independence, 
but the jubilant contortions of his passion as it bore him 
irresistibly along in its current. If an angry man listens at 
all to the admonitions of prudence and sense addressed to 
him during the heat of his rage, they serve only to inflame 
his reckless determination to do as he likes ; he rebels against 
them as impertinent attempts to constrain his freedom, in- 
sulting and exulting over them. Let him think of them 
afterwards when he is calmer and clearer in mind, then he 
is amazed and perhaps ashamed that he did not suffer them 
to affect him. But when appeal is made from Philip drunk 
to Philip sober the appeal is to two different natures with 
different likings ; and it is not legitimate to leave that fact 
out of sight and to base an argument of freedom of choice 
on the assumption that the appeal was made to the same 
natures ; for assuredly the actuating inward powers — namely, 
the force of passion which prevails on one occasion, and the 



CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS. 89 

force of prudence which prevails on the other —are not in the 
same proportionate strength on the two occasions. The 
problem of the motive elements of a particular act of will is 
a problem of the particular state of the individual at the 
time, not of his state a day or a mouth before or a day or a 
month after ; not even of his state a few minutes before or 
after, if there has happened meanwhile the pain of a colic, 
or the torpor of a sated passion, or some other bodily change 
too mean and trivial for the appreciation of high philosophy, 
but not too mean and trivial to produce far-reaching effects 
in the extremely complex, intimately united, and mobile 
elements of the organism. 

In discussing the motivation of will, it is not always suf- 
ficiently borne in mind by those who advocate its so-called 
freedom that the individual is a whole, compounded not of a 
single sentiment or passion but of several sentiments and 
passions, each of which has its especial object and gratifica- 
tion, and that in doing what pleases him best he may still 
be doing very differently at different times, according to the 
particular sentiment or passion that is then uppermost. The 
strongest desire of one occasion shall not be the strongest 
desire of another occasion, and yet it may remain true 
that the will follows the strongest desire. Nothing but 
interminable disputations, futile and profitless, will come 
of treating the matter as one of abstract will and abstract 
desire. In order to be fruitful, the discussion must leave the 
void of the abstract and fix itself upon the particular will 
and the particular desire. 1 In fact, though the organism 
subserves one large end — the welfare of the whole — there are 
many subsidiary ends included within this main one, each of 
which has its own desire of, and pleasure in, fulfilment ; a 
special gratification, moreover, which in moderation and due 
subordination is good in the particular and good for the 
whole, but in over-indulgence or excess is bad in the parti- 
cular and for the whole. As many such ends as there are, so 
many correspondent wills are there ; as many as are the dif- 

1 It is not in the multiplication of voluminous systems of psychology, 
but in the exact scientific exposition of a single well-studied case of indi- 
vidual psychology, that the real hope of progress in psychology lies. 

7 



90 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

ferences in the dignities of these ends, so many are the differ- 
ences in the qualities or dignities of their several wills. 

By the power which a man has of looking before and after 
he is freed from the necessity of living in the present and 
of yielding to the immediate impulse, as the infant, the idiot, 
and the lower animals for the most part do ; in a particular 
conjunction of circumstances he can look back to other con- 
junctions of circumstances, or in a particular social medium 
he can refer back to, and, in referring, realise to some de- 
gree, other social mediums experienced by him personally, 
or known to him historically; so he, having a historical 
being, makes the past present, and is able to postpone a 
present pleasure out of regard to a future gratification of the 
same kind or of a higher kind. Suppose the case of one 
who, after some passing thoughts of resistance, yields reck- 
lessly to a present temptation of sense in spite of the gra- 
vest warnings of reason and in clear foresight of the pain- 
ful consequences of his indulgence; with deliberate will he 
gains his hour of bliss, though he knows he will have to 
suffer a week of woe afterwards : shall we say of him that he 
is or is not acting with freewill ? Is he not actually vindi- 
cating the freedom of a lower from the coercion of a higher 
will ? What he does is to resist the attempted coercion of 
the higher motives that press upon him and to indulge in a 
reckless freedom of will ; the very sense of defiant freedom 
which he has in his resistance to, and rebellion against, the 
constraint of higher motive being the pleasure that actuates 
him and assures him of it. He prefers the easy freedom of 
lower will to the constrained freedom of higher will; in 
other words, he prefers one to another of a hundred possible 
wills, all having their several motives of determination, that 
are in some of a higher, in others of a lower order. But 
he is not free, says the alarmed moralist, when he yields to 
the lower motives that lead him down-hill ; he is free only 
when he obeys the higher motives that lead him upwards, 
and most free of all when he has made such obedience into 
the servitude of habit. In that case, his self-consciousness 
deceives him grossty, for it is certain that it tells him and 
makes him believe he is as free in the one case as in the 



CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS. 91 

other; and if he be deceived in the one, he may well be de- 
ceived in the other also. The moralist who has come to the 
clear opinion that liberty and supreme reason are one — 
that always ' freedom with right reason dwells ' — would not 
do amiss to reflect that, in reality, no constraint is more 
stern, heavy, and severe than that of reason, which, if 
dominant, leaves a person no choice between two lines of 
conduct ; he cannot choose, if he understands them, between 
two mathematical' conclusions, one of which is plainly right 
and the other plainly wrong ; cannot choose, wishing to live, 
whether he should live by taking food or by doing without 
food. Its command is not a capricious, impulsive, transient 
domination, the tyranny of an hour, obeyed with more or less 
pleasure, as that of passion mostly is, but a steady, persis- 
tent, grinding despotism, weighing upon the individual with 
a dull and mechanical pressure, as it were, and enforcing 
an obedience that is attended by little pleasure. The ques- 
tion of freewill, as commonly stated, is insoluble truly, but 
insoluble only because it has no meaning when we cease to 
talk of an abstract notional will and begin to occupy our- 
selves with the particular volitions. 

Little favour will these discussions have, and little will 
they weigh, with the introspectionist, who in the end does 
not fail to fall back dogmatically upon the direct intuition 
of freedom. Always, too, metaphysics is at hand to provide 
him with abundant arguments to justify the intuition ; for 
its sterile perseverance is like that of the barren womb 
which never cries 'Enough.' As one might say — I know that 
the sun goes round the heavens by the plain evidence of sense, 
and arguments to prove the contrary, even though unanswer- 
able, will not shake my faith in that positive testimony ; so 
he will say — I know that my will is free, for I feel it in every 
volition which I exert, and arguments to prove the contrary, 
even though unanswerable, will not shake my unswerving 
faith in the positive testimony of my consciousness. If the 
answer be made unto him, Be not deceived, it is not the 
sun which goes round the earth, but the earth which goes 
round the sun ; and in like manner it is not you who are free 
and nature that is under necessity, but you who are under 



92 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

necessity and nature that is free ; — he will protest that the 
answer is an absurdity. Nevertheless, it is not ; for if there 
be freedom anywhere, it certainly cannot be in the conscious 
world of the relative, but must be in the unconscious world of 
the noumenal. As it was in the beginning so will it be at the 
end of the argument : he has so great a faith in the intuition 
of freedom that he will not doubt. Between what he wishes 
when he is inclined to a favourite sin and his sense of duty 
to resist the self-gratification he feels that he has a choice ; 
and when he acts from the higher motive he pleases and 
deludes himself with the notion that he has willed otherwise 
than as he wished, forgetting that he has after all wished to 
do his duty. ' Man always wills to do that which he desires 
most, when he does not feel himself obliged by the sentiment 
of duty to do that which he desires less : ' such is the con- 
sistent inconsistency of the freewill doctrine, which — to say 
nothing of the absurdity of making the desire in the senti- 
ment of duty less than the desire which it overcomes — 
actually represents a/ree man as being obliged to do what he 
would not wish to do, and as rising to higher freedom in 
proportion as the constraint of duty becomes stronger. To 
common apprehension does that not sound very like deter- 
minism ? It must at any rate be deemed a strange example 
of the emancipation of will from motive, though rightly 
viewed as an example of emancipation from lower motive. 
The wishing or willing of an end of any sort is really not 
consistent with a conception of perfect freedom ; it is at once 
to make an imperfection of it. Even God willing an end 
would be, as Spinoza said, an incomplete God. A person can 
be logically free only when there is such a complete equi- 
librium between sentiments, passions, and reflections that 
he is in a state of complete indifference ; when he is not 
under the least shadow of constraint to act one way or the 
other, or to act at all ; when therefore he, properly speaking, 
cannot act at all. 

Always in respect of freewill or liberty is it to be rightly 
borne in mind that the notion of it, whatever its intrinsic 
value, is helpful against the pressure of a particular passion 
or motive. The belief of its existence therefore may do real 



CONCLUDING KEFLECTIONS. 93 

work in the mind, even though the thing have no existence. 
In its progress thus far mankind has owed perhaps more to 
beliefs that have turned out not to be true than to truths 
that have remained true. The notion of freewill becomes 
itself, merely as notion, a centre of power in the mind ; it 
gives time for pause and reflection, when it is stimulated 
to action through the accomplished associations on the 
required occasions ; and if it has happily been thus brought 
into inhibitive action on many similar occasions, it gains the 
strength and ease of habit. Here, as elsewhere, the conscious 
energy of past function becomes the unconscious mechanism 
of present function, which thereupon is able to work without 
attention and almost without exertion; will loses its cha- 
racter, so to speak, in attaining to its unconscious perfection ; 
and meanwhile the free, unattached path-seeking conscious- 
ness and will, that are, as it were, the pioneers and perf ecters 
of progress, are available to initiate new and to perfect old 
functions. A passionate person who has by patient watch- 
fulness over himself and by a course of steady perseverance 
and practice accustomed himself to wear an outward air of 
calmness and to speak in quiet, measured language when he 
is inwardly in a towering passion, making thus a clever art 
of his natural defect — as it is the part of wisdom to do with 
all natural defects — succeeds in making that regulated dis- 
charge of energy the habit of his life, and in the end does it 
quite easily ; so much so that nine out of ten persons who 
have to do with him imagine him to be a person of sin- 
gularly calm temperament. To him meanwhile thus practis- 
ing his clever art well-nigh automatically, there is this 
advantage — that his consciousness is free to take clear and 
full account of all the circumstances of the crisis in a 
rapid reflection upon them, and to grasp the right issue, 
instead of being swallowed up in the torrent of passion. 
Here also the lesson does not fail to make itself evident, that 
such excellence of culture cannot ever be reached by a life of 
pure self-inspection and mental discipline in the closet ; he 
alone can gain it who is content to gain it by diligent 
practice among men and things, seeking and using the 
occasions of exercise — by doing not thinking only, and doing 



94 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

with and through and for others ; not, indeed, without feeling, 
but with feeling put into deed rather than into display. 

If man must thus patiently manufacture himself to habits 
of well-doing by the diligent practice of doing well, and on 
most occasions perceives good habits to be a better security 
of good conduct than good principles, what becomes of the 
opinion that freewill is the foundation and fountain of mora- 
lity? For, next to the supposed direct intuition of free- 
dom, the postulate of its moral necessity is the strongest 
pillar of the doctrine. If man be not free to do well or ill, 
how can he be deemed responsible for what he does? Well; 
perhaps his responsibility is not for doing what he does, 
being what he is, but for being what he is. Let us inquire 
a little further into the matter. To deny the freedom of the 
will, we are told, is to make morality impossible. Of which 
crisp and confident formula, an opponent might declare that it 
is no more true than it is true that an acknowledgment of the 
law of gravitation makes walking impossible ; indeed, might 
justly perhaps go further and say that moral responsibility 
could no more coexist with freedom of will than a man could 
walk without the law of gravitation. Were any man really 
free he would be free from responsibility for his character, 
which he could not then train and fashion ; it is because he 
is not free, but a product in an order of development, that he 
is responsible : responsible for the exercise of his reason to 
establish a mental order. Does not then the recognition of 
the reign of law in mind actually enlarge and enhance the 
rational conception of freedom, by bringing home to the 
individual a sense of responsibility not for what he does 
only, but in some measure for what he feels and thinks and 
is ? And by bringing home to one generation a stern sense 
of responsibility for what the next generation shall feel, 
think, and be ? For certainly the circumstances of one 
generation make much of the fate of the next. 

It is hard to see how the notion of responsibility can 
possibly attach to things that are not linked to one 
another by the tie of causation, and how without such 
unfailing tie there could fail to be chaos instead of kosmos 
in the region of mind. Assuredly the sense of responsi- 



CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS. 95 

bility is not founded on the consciousness of freedom, since 
it exists in persons who deny positively the validity of such 
consciousness, and who moreover argue that upon that 
foundation, even if it be accepted as valid, not responsi- 
bility but irresponsibility alone can be based. Rather 
perhaps ought we to say with Kant that the categorical 
moral imperative, which inwardly commands us to do duty 
independently of all external attractions or distractions, 
imposes the conception of freedom ; that liberty is of neces- 
sity involved in this conception of obligation ; and that we are 
bound by such implication of moral law to accept the concept, 
even though but for it we should never have thought of 
freedom in any department of knowledge. We are to take 
it in fact as the implicate of a fundamental obligation, 
instinct in us, to do uprightly ; for that is what it actually 
comes to. It is the law in the heart, the monitor in the 
bosom, suggesting with urgency, enjoining with power. In 
other words, having first wrapped up a principle of liberty 
in our conception of duty, we proceed in due time to unwrap 
it, and having discovered it where we put it, we can properly 
declare that it was involved there. On the one hand, then, 
the freedom of will, as perceived by us in ourselves, is 
maintained to be the basis of morality ; on the other hand, 
the moral basis is affirmed to involve or to postulate implicitly 
a freedom which we could not ever have perceived explicitly. 
To which principle is our homage due ? 

Without denying the categorical moral imperative, its 
supposed implication is nowise self-evident, for it may fairly 
be argued that the obligation no more involves such a con- 
ception of liberty as is assumed, than the consciousness of 
freedom involves morality. It is because mankind has felt 
dimly and vaguely the inward imperative, because it has 
been unawares under that constraint, and because it has not 
been free to go its own way, that it has made the progress 
which it has made from its lower to its higher stages of 
being. The implicate of the moral imperative is not liberty 
but constraint. Hence to our surprise we struggle against 
passions that prompt and please in order to accomplish duties 
that repel, and are at first almost painful ; the lower afnni- 



96 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

ties and attractions of our natures, as in chemical develop- 
ments, sacrificing themselves to higher affinities, disappearing 
in the process, and by such sacrifice constituting the higher. 
Had man been left to follow freely the bent of such freewill 
as he has he would most likely have gone the way of his 
passions to an unspeakable degradation, if not to actual 
destruction. At bottom that which we discern in his moral 
instinct is the necessity of nature operating in the evolution 
of the highest organic matter and so urging or compelling it 
into more complex combinations and functions. Since the 
process is going on continually in chemical combinations, 
why wonder that a similar process takes place among the 
several passions to accomplish a moral evolution, and that it 
gives intimation of itself in feeling? 

A positive fact of observation it is that the power of 
adaptation to surroundings within certain limits, intrinsically 
and extrinsically fixed, is a property of all living organic 
matter ; and assuredly this property belongs to the highest 
evolution of matter, as it exists in the exceeding delicate 
and complex organisation of the human brain, as well as to 
the simplest particle of living protoplasm. The law of 
adaptation which we thus discern and trace alike in every 
instance of organic development and function, we discern 
and trace also in the accommodation of the individual to his 
social surroundings and in the consequent modification of his 
character. Let him cease then to labour to know himself in 
himself, and let him strive diligently to know himself — as 
he can only, properly speaking, know himself — in nature ; 
looking not for the source of any absolute criterion of 
truth or right in himself, where he can never find more than 
self, but seeking it in the common feeling or instinct 
derived from the large experience of the race. Humanity, 
not self, is the true concern of the individual who would 
rise to a higher self. 

Here, then, is made plainly manifest the duty of the in- 
dividual to place himself in circumstances of action in which 
his character will be modified for the better — to do in order 
to be ; the solemn responsibility under which he is to deter- 
mine rationally in himself, by help of circumstances, that 



CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS. 97 

which may thereby be predetermined in his future conduct, 
and in some measure in his posterity. If he has no living 
posterity in whom thus to strive to predetermine a good 
manner of thinking and feeling, any good work he does 
which is an instruction, a joy, a help to those who come 
after him, by awakening them to sympathy with thoughts 
and hopes and feelings that otherwise they might have 
heeded not, shall be his posterity. All which it will perhaps 
be said is true, and can be entirely accepted ; but it does 
not touch the indisputable fact that a person has sometimes 
by a solemn resolution changed the whole line of conduct of 
his life immediately. There have been many other moral 
revolutions like that which converted Saul the persecutor 
into Paul the apostle. True ; but will anybody seriously 
maintain that the enthusiasm, the moral energy, the fiery 
character, the strong will, the intellectual power of that 
apostle were the pure result of his conversion ? Do you 
not find as decisive evidence of his daemonic character in his 
epistles and in the events of his apostleship as you find in 
the energy that he displayed as a persecutor ? If a great 
sinner becomes a great saint, and the greater sinner the 
greater saint, he draws his inspiration not from the void but 
from his character, whose energies have happily now got a 
better direction. Without question, a deep moral agitation 
produced by a powerful impression and reinforced by habitual 
recollections, especially when it is swelled by the infection of 
like emotion in many other persons, will reach below ordinary 
habits of thought and feeling and stir the inmost elements of 
character, fusing and welding them into new moulds. But 
the material must be there, and must be of such quality as 
to be capable of taking these new forms or moulds. Always 
must there be something akin within to vibrate in sympathy 
with the quality of the power without ; if not, the latter will 
pass like wind. No motion will unlock the proper emotion 
if the latter be not embodied in mental structure. It is a 
foolish illusion to believe that any one in whose nature is 
neither sincerity nor uprightness will become upright by 
undergoing a sudden conversion ; if he was essentially un- 
righteous before, he will be unrighteous still, being only a 



98 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT. 

hypocrite in addition, consciously or unconsciously ; if sin- 
cerely upright now, there was the basis of sincerity and up- 
rightness in him then : he was at least genuine in his evil 
doings. Moreover, to ensure the permanent utility of the 
new upheaval of feeling, to establish it in a steady and 
stable moral growth, the impression that caused it must 
have been so powerful as to recur ever after to the mind 
in vivid force, or there must have been a subjection to a 
succession of impressions of the same kind as it. So will 
be effected gradually that transformation of nature whereby 
virtue becomes structural habit and its exercise a pleasure ; 
and that is the guarantee of its stability and permanence. 

It is Pascal who, after pointing out that those who quit 
the service of God to return to that of the world do so only 
because they find more pleasure in the world, goes on to say 
— ' de meme on ne quitterait jamais les plaisirs du monde 
pour embrasser la croix de Jesus- Christ, si on ne trouvait 
plus de douceur dans le mepris, dans la pauvrete, dans le 
denuement et dans le rebut des hommes, que dans les delices 
du peche. Et aussi, comme dit Tertullien, il ne faut pas 
croire que la vie des Chretiens soit une vie de tristesse. On ne 
quitte les plaisirs que pour d'autres plus grands, 9 



paet n. 

WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL, SOCIAL, AND EVOLU- 
TIONAL RELATIONS. 



SECTION I. 

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 

Those who uphold a metaphysical will protest eagerly that 
there is nothing in the known operations of matter, even 
when in its most complex organic forms, that is in the least 
like the energy we are conscious of as will, or can so much 
as be conceived to be a physical basis of it. They would do 
well, however, to explain what exact measure of meaning 
they give to the word like when they say so. As it is 
through self-consciousness that we know the energy which 
we call will, and as it is through our senses that we know 
the so-called physical forces, it is plain that we have no 
right to expect them to be like, as conscious states. The 
effect which the same object produces upon the different 
senses that it is capable of affecting is of course in each case 
a quite different conscious state, being special, unlike any- 
thing else, sui generis ; so much so that an object known 
well to one sense would be perfectly strange to another sense 
acting alone — the eye blind to thunder, the ear deaf to 
lightning. If a person blind from birth obtains sight sud- 
denly by some happy operation of surgery, he does not 
recognise at all by the eye in the first instance an object 
that he knows well by touch ; and did the two senses not 
go on afterwards to act together in the apprehension of it, 
to combine their results in perception, it would always be 



100 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

a different object to them. Whence springs a not unin- 
teresting reflection : that if the several senses only acted 
separately, an object would appear to be as many objects as 
there were senses that it was capable of affecting, and so, 
with a, dozen things around him, a man might believe himself 
to be living amidst a great many objects and revel in the 
variety of his existence. Is it not perhaps actually because 
of the fewness and the limitations of his senses that he 
believes nature, which is one, to be so various as it seems ? 

The experience of the outer senses then entirely contra- 
dicts the notion that the information derived from self-con- 
sciousness can be like that given by any of them. The same 
object- — the functioning brain — must necessarily produce a 
very different impression (if it produce any) upon the in- 
ternal sense of consciousness from that which it produces 
upon the senses of an observer; the self-conscious state, 
that is, could not be in the least like anything that we know 
of the operations of cerebral matter : no motion of its 
molecules, gyrator} 7 , undulatory, rotatory, nor any combina- 
tion of such motions that we can imagine, could have any 
conceivable analogy with a sensation: between them no 
comprehensible relation can exist, an impassable gulf must 
remain fixed. All which, put succinctly and plainly, is 
simply this : no physics of body can possibly be the meta- 
physics of mind. Certainly it would be strange enough if 
that which is physical could be at the same time that which 
is defined to be not physical — that is, beyond physics ; that 
which appeals to outer sense be at the same time that which 
does not appeal to outer sense. As I have already pointed 
out, self-consciousness acts alone, without help from asso- 
ciation, either with the external senses or with any supple- 
mentary internal modes of observation; and it cannot 
therefore ever identify a common cause of its affections and 
of the affections of an external sense. But is it thereupon 
absolutely necessary to conclude that these belong to 
existences of an entirely opposite nature : the one to a 
spiritual and the other to a material order of being ? 

Light and sound, regarded purely as conscious states, 
are as unlike as can be; there is no relation conceivable 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 



101 



between them in that internal aspect ; nevertheless, they are 
not really so unrelated and so radically asunder as they seem, 
since, by going deeper into an examination of their respective 
natures than unaided sense could do, we have reached a 
higher plane of knowledge, and from that we perceive them 
both to be caused by undulations in elastic media and to 
have remarkable analogies. Is it not the fact indeed that 
the undulatory theory of light was first suggested by the 
undulations of sound ? In like manner, the gulf between 
the conception of the movements of cerebral molecules and 
the self-consciousness of will-energy may well be due to the 
different ways of acquiring them ; molecular motion and will 
be one and the same event seen under different aspects, and 
to be known as such one day from a higher plane of know- 
ledge. Perhaps when that time comes the theory of an all- 
pervading mentiferous ether may help to bridge over the 
difficulty. For if the object and the brain are alike pervaded 
by such a hyper-subtile ether ; and if the impression which 
the particular object makes upon mind be then a sort of 
pattern of the mentiferous undulations as they are stirred 
and conditioned within it by its particular form and proper- 
ties ; and if the mind in turn be the mentiferous undulations 
as conditioned by the convoluted form and the exceedingly 
complicated and delicate structure of the brain ; — then it is 
plain we have eluded the impassable difficulty of conceiving 
the action of mind upon matter — the material upon the 
immaterial — which results from the notion of their entirely 
different natures. 

Here in fact is a theory that gets rid at the same time 
of the gross materiality of matter and of the intangible 
spirituality of mind, and instead of binding them together 
in an abhorred and unnatural union of o<pposites, unites 
them in a happy and congenial marriage in an intermediate 
region, and, if I may so speak, in an intermediate substance ; 
a substance which, mediator-like, partakes the nature of 
both without being exclusively either. If perchance you 
object that the theory really only evades the difficulty by 
putting mind, in the shape of a mentiferous ether, into 
nature and virtually getting rid of matter, this answer shall 




102 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

suffice — that the special form and structure of the brain are 
necessary to determine such undulations of its pervading 
ether as are truly mental ; and that the undulations of 
mentiferous ether in inorganic and most organic objects 
cannot therefore have anything more of the character of 
conscious mind than their material particles have. But of 
what nse is the theory in the end, since in no case does it 
help us in the least to an explanation of consciousness, it 
will be said ? There, indeed, like most speculative theories 
of a grandly ambitious character, it will require consider- 
able buttressing ; it must, in fact, in order to account for 
consciousness, assume that which it is required to explain ; 
must be supplemented by the hypothesis (which, being 
positively wanted, may be said, according to true theoristic 
fashion, to follow of necessity) that from the multitudinous 
collisions of mentiferous undulations in the brain, and their 
consequent infinitely complicated refractions and reflections 
there — a sort of avrjpcO^ov ysXacr/jua of brain^waves, such as 
one sees on the sunlit waves of ocean — eventually is evolved 
such a complex modification of undulations, or such a system 
of inconceivably rapid atom-quiverings, as expresses itself in 
a certain quasi-luminosity or phosphorescence — that is to say, 
in consciousness. If man is able to come and become by 
x evolutio7b from molecules, why should not consciousness 
come and become by evolution from undulations ? 

Leaving for the present the high regions of this most 
pregnant theory which, if set forth elaborately in a sufficient 
number of chapters, with all the proper pomp and panoply of 
swelling words and thought- simulating phrases, would, with- 
out doubt, explain everything from the formation of a mole- 
cule to the inheritance by a boy of his grandfather's habit of 
scratching his nose — all things, in fact, under the sun and in 
the sun, and in the heavens that are above the sun — let me 
claim and fix attention to this plain fact : that, although we 
know the events of our mental life by means of conscious- 
ness only, these events do, nevertheless, sometimes proceed 
without consciousness on our parts, and in that case must 
be going on somewhere on the one side or the other of that 
impassable gulf, that bottomless abyss, that lies between 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 103 

physics and metaphysics. On which side ? We do not ob- 
serve them directly, it is true, but we infer them positively 
from observing exactly the same signs and the same effects 
of their operations that they produce when they are opera- 
ting consciously. In such case, they come to us as objec- 
tive knowledge ; and the objective knowledge, as such, must 
cross the gulf in order to get into consciousness. How does 
it manage to do that? It does succeed, perhaps, because 
the truth, after all, is that the gulf between matter and 
mind is not a gulf between two entirely separate orders of 
existence, but a gulf between two entirely different states or 
modes of consciousness. Here, in fact, as everywhere else, 
when we push the matter home, we perceive how much too 
much we make habitually of the range of function of con- 
sciousness in mental operations. Examine closely and with- 
out bias the ordinary mental operations of daily life, and 
you will surely discover that consciousness has not one-tenth 
part of the function therein which it is commonly assumed 
to have : it is with it there as it notably is with it in ordi- 
nary vision, where we only see directly a very small part of 
that which we think we see, for we directly see a few familiar 
signs only, while all the rest is inferential ; that which is 
inferred in the interpretation of the signs having been ob- 
tained directly by previous experiences of vision and of our 
other senses. Consciousness does essential service in the 
building up of faculties of thought and action ; its part is 
comparatively small in the use which we make of them 
afterwards. 

As the higher modes of consciousness unquestionably 
rest on the lower modes, we may properly, in trying to get to 
the nearest approach of consciousness to molecular motion, 
take for consideration the simplest mode of sensation that 
we ever experience. Now it is certain that a sensation 
that appears to consciousness to be perfectly simple is 
sometimes a compound of more simple sensations, none of 
which it really resembles ; these more simple sensations are, 
in their turn, compounds of still more elementary sensa- 
tions ; and the elements of these, if not themselves, lie 
beneath the threshold of consciousness, contributing to the 



104 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

excitation which, when it reaches a certain height or a cer- 
tain complexity, oversteps the threshold. In every conscious 
state there are thus at work conscious, sub-conscious, and 
infra-conscious energies, the last as indispensable as the first. 
We descend in our analysis of consciousness to the very 
borders of molecular motion — to the place where the two 
aspects of being meet and seem to coalesce ; for, on the one 
hand, where sensation actually expires, the continuance of a 
connected reflex movement shall prove the persistence of 
molecular motion ; and, on the other hand, the experiments 
of physiology prove a definite measurable period of mole- 
cular commotion, known as the 6 excitatory stage,' to precede 
invariably the excitation of the sensation. Moreover, the 
same stimulus which when applied to the nerve suffices 
ordinarily to excite a sensation, will not raise the ' excitatory 
stage ' into consciousness, but will leave it in the state of 
latent stimulation, if the temperature of the nerve be lowered 
a few degrees ; so that a few degrees of temperature make all 
the difference between soul and not-soul in a process other- 
wise exactly the same. Here are combinations of infra-con- 
scious energies to produce a sub-conscious or an elementary 
conscious state, and thereafter combinations of elementary 
consciousnesses to produce a conscious result that does not 
resemble any of them ; not otherwise than as chemical 
elements combine to form a compound with new properties. 
What reason can be given why these infra-conscious factors 
of the period of latent stimulation may not resemble or be 
actually molecular movements ? And if they be so, are they 
so only up to the moment when the spark of nascent consci- 
ousness appears, and do they then instantly take on a new 
character ? 

Two things are sufficiently obvious with respect to 
them : first, that self-consciousness cannot tell us any- 
thing whatever about them (it would not be self-conscious- 
ness, but other-self-consciousness, if it could), notwithstand- 
ing that, as we have the best means of knowing, they exist 
and underlie its states ; secondly, that the means of observa- 
tion by which we discover and examine them do not yield 
the smallest information concerning the conscious states that 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 105 

accompany or follow them. However, when we have traced 
out and established the connections, we have done all that we 
can be required rightly or wisely need attempt to do. Why 
brain functions as consciousness is just as barren a ques- 
tion as why a rose smells sweet ; it is enough for us that we 
perceive by experience that it does. Fragrance of smell or 
fragrance of feeling — one is neither more nor less mysterious 
than the other. In order to accomplish our proper work of 
setting forth the unfailing order of the relations between the 
objective fact and the subjective feeling, we must make use 
of the two methods of investigation — that is, must look in- 
wardly to perceive one aspect of the relation and look out- 
wardly to perceive the other aspect of it. Are you dissatis- 
fied with a science thus founded on a double method, fear- 
ing a rending cleft in the foundations ? There is no cause ; 
the two aspects, subjective and objective, will coincide and 
corroborate one another; and so, perhaps, in the end psy- 
chology will become the most certain of sciences, because 
founded on the coincidence of two independent methods of 
investigation — namely, on the direct and immediate method 
of introspection, and on the objective method of physical 
inquiry. 

Having now done so much to clear the ground and to 
set the problem in its true light, it is seen that the assertion 
of the entire unlikeness of the deliverances of self-conscious- 
ness to any operations which sense informs us of need not, 
though really a truism, carry with it the stupendous con- 
clusions as to two different orders of existences which it is 
invariably weighted with. We will go on now to inquire 
whether the operations of the body do not present anything 
in the least like the most elementary and simple functions 
of will. And here, of course, our duty is to take for consider- 
ation the most simple and irreducible elements, not the 
most complex. The function of a single secretion-cell, 
thoroughly understood, would teach as much as the study of 
a thousand such cells, for it would be the explanation of the 
physiology of secretion ; and it is in the complete function 
of the simplest single cell that the required knowledge must 
be sought. In like manner, when we inquire into the 



106 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

functions of reason and will, we shall do wisely not to begin 
by thinking of Newton reasoning or of Napoleon willing, 
but to do our best to attend at the humble birth of reason 
and will. Nowise exalted is the birthplace of the divine 
on earth : that lesson the manger of Bethlehem might have 
taught us. 

The first task is to take particular notice of the different 
sorts of complex movement which the body is capable of 
performing by itself, and to examine and appreciate their 
true character. The simplest nervous operation, that which 
is the elemental type or physiological unit of which the 
more complex processes are built up, as a great house is 
built of simple bricks, is what is called a reflex act. An im- 
pression is made upon some part of the body; the mole- 
cular change or the wave of motion produced thereby in 
the sensory or afferent nerve is conducted along it to a 
nerve-centre and unlocks the energy thereof; that energy is 
thereupon transmitted or reflected along a connected motor 
or efferent nerve, and actuates a particular movement through 
the proper muscles, a movement that may carry a purposive 
stamp or not. For example, a strong light is thrown upon 
the retina, and the pupil contracts instantly in order, as we 
say, to exclude, because the effect is to exclude, the excess 
of light ; a blow to the eye is threatened, and the eyelid 
winks involuntarily to protect it ; a lump of food is pushed 
to the back of the mouth, and so soon as it gets there the 
muscles contract, grasp and push it on ; the tip of the finger 
is put between the lips of the malformed infant just born 
without a brain, and it immediately makes sucking move- 
ments. In these and multiform other movements of a like 
kind, though each fulfils a definite end, the will has no part 
whatever ; they take place not only without its concurrence, 
but in spite of its resistance sometimes, as everybody knows, 
and one of them — the contraction of the pupil — even when 
a person is completely unconscious in sleep or in apoplexy. 

Most striking perhaps in this connection is the instructive 
instance furnished by a well-known experiment on the frog : 
if its thigh be touched with a drop of irritating acid it rubs 
it off with the foot of that side ; and when it is prevented 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 107 

from using that foot for the purpose, it makes use of the 
opposite leg. Plain evidence, it might seem, of intelligent 
design and will on its part, for when it is frustrated in one 
adaptive effort it has immediate recourse to another. Bnt 
exclude intelligent design and will by cutting off the frog's 
head, and the result of the experiment, if made with the 
proper care, is the same : it tries first to use its right foot 
to wipe off the acid, and when it is hindered from helping 
itself in that way it bends the other leg across for the 
purpose, exactly as it did when it had its head. Of the 
two fundamental types of animal movements — that is to say, 
movements of aggression, in order to ensue pleasure and 
increase life ; and movements of defence, in order to eschew 
pain and ward off what is hurtful to life — Goltz has obtained 
examples of each in the decapitated frog. For besides the 
above-mentioned remarkable movement of defence, he has 
elicited the quack or croak which is the expression of joy, by 
stroking the creature gently on its back, as well as the 
movement of the male to embrace the female in sexual 
congress, by gentle pressure and rubbing, at the proper 
season, of its breast and the inside of its arms. 

With what an admirable purpose then does the headless 
frog act, howbeit it knows not what it does, any more than 
the pupil does when it contracts in a bright light, or than 
the branch of a tree does when, unable to get to the light 
in one direction, it tries patiently another and more cir- 
cuitous way. Behold plain proof of sensibility, intelli- 
gence and will, may well be the exclamation of those who 
are not sufficiently mindful that the true mode of viewing 
the phenomena is not to read into them from a higher 
experience what is not there, but to read out of them, 
without bias, simply what is there. The truly warranted 
conclusion is that the nervous system has the power, 
instinct in its constitution or acquired by training, to exe- 
cute mechanically acts that have all the semblance of 
being designed and voluntary, without there being the least 
consciousness or will in them ; not otherwise perhaps than 
as the ant perforins all the duties of a good citizen in a 
complex society, without having an elaborate theory of the 



108 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

constitution of the society in its tiny brain. If people 
choose to call voluntary the acts that are not conscious, they 
do not thereby alter the facts, which remain quite different 
in spite of the common naming ; what they do is simply to 
destroy the definite meanings of the terms that they mis- 
apply. We cannot have will where we have not conscious- 
ness, but it may well be that we have in these adaptive 
bodily acts the basis of that which, when it takes place in 
a higher nerve-centre, we are conscious of as will — an 
energy capable of executing purposive movements, and free, 
so to speak, to choose the right one, but not free to choose 
the wrong one. A perfect consummation and bliss : to be 
freed from the liberty to go wrong, as Malebranche prayed 
to be, and to possess the freedom of necessarily doing right, 
which he prayed to have ! 

As soon as the young chicken is out of the egg it pecks 
at a grain of corn with quick and exact aim ; that is to say, 
without the least education or previous practice it is able to 
put various muscles into action, concurrent and sequent, 
with the nicest adaptation of the requisite degree of con- 
traction of each muscle, to perform a very complex act. 
Given the mechanism ready to hand, all the skill of the 
most accomplished workman could not put it into such nice 
and adapted action to do the exact work. Many months 
must pass and much tedious training must be gone through 
before an infant can learn to pick up a grain at all, and no 
amount of training will enable it to do so with the ease, 
nicety and rapidity which the chick shows without any 
training ; indeed, the chicken's incapacity would be to 
imitate the bungling attempts of the child. There must be 
on the child's part much patient adaptation and many 
repetitions of effort in order to accomplish the involution, 
so to say, of an acquired energy that shall afterwards be 
evolved and discharged in function. When the infant 
has at last learnt tediously to do badly that which the 
chicken does well at once we say that it acts from volition, 
while the chicken is said to act from instinct ; in sajdng 
which it is not meant to imply — at any rate, by those who 
do not allow a word to do service for an idea — that instinct 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 109 

is some wonderful entity in it, but simply that the power or 
faculty of doing the thing is instinct or innate in the con- 
stitution of its nervous system. It is but another way of 
saying that the body has the power, in virtue simply of its 
physiological mechanism, without any help of will, to execute 
most complex purposive acts in the most perfect manner. 
Whether a power of the kind is inborn, as is the case com- 
monly in animals and in not a few instances in man, or is 
acquired by training and practice, as is the case in a few 
instances in animals and commonly in man, does not matter 
as regards its essentially physical nature : in either case we 
are entitled to see in it a pretty fair physical basis of a 
rudimentary will. 

Another step forward. As everybody knows, the will 
has not the power to execute only, but it has the power to 
prevent execution, to hold impulses in check; indeed, its 
energies are most tasked and its highest qualities shown in 
the exercise of this controlling function. Our appetites and 
passions prompt or urge their immediate gratification ; it is 
the nobler function of will, enlightened by reason looking 
before and after, to curb these lower impulses of our nature. 
An emotion springing from offended self-love calls into 
action its congenial ideas of revenge, and instigates conduct 
in the line of their resultant energies; it is the higher 
function of a rightly inspired will, having regard to the 
ultimate good of the whole being instead of the present 
gratification of a particular function or passion of it, to 
withstand these forces by summoning into action thoughts 
of a higher and wider range, whether prudential, moral, or 
philosophical. The question is, then, whether there is any- 
thing in the operations of the nervous system which can 
conceivably be the basis of this exalted governing function 
— this capacity, when impulse urges, to act from duty. 

When we pass in review the various reflex movements of 
the body we perceive that there are some — and those essen- 
tial to the continuance of life — over which the will has no 
authority whatever : the movements of the heart and of the 
intestines, for example, which go on regularly night and day, 
asleep and awake, it can neither slacken nor quicken nor 



110 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

stop by any exertion that it can mate. Neither there nor 
in the silent depths of the organic life of the tissues are its 
commands heard. Other reflex movements, those of 
breathing, for instance, it can control partially; we can 
breathe quickly or slowly as we please, or even stop breathing 
for a time, though not for long, since no one can kill himself 
by simply holding his breath. The will has in that business 
a strictly limited authority — the authority to intervene and 
modify, but not the authority to govern absolutely. In 
order to form a conception of its probable mode of operation 
when it thus intervenes with effect, it is desirable to appre- 
ciate the nature of pure physiological inhibition as we 
observe it work to check or stop action that is entirely reflex. 

Take, for instance, the beating of the heart : the experi- 
menter can easily quicken or slacken the pulsation of an 
animal's heart by manipulating the proper nerves ; for by stimu- 
lating the vagus nerve he retards them, and by stimulating 
the sympathetic nerve he quickens them > thus he demon* 
strates that the function of one nerve can be exerted directly 
to inhibit the function of another nerve. But besides this 
direct effect he can produce the inhibition in an indirect 
way : for example, when he suspends a frog by its legs and 
then taps sharply on its belly, or when he exposes its in- 
testines for a short time to the air so as to render them very 
sensitive, and then simply touches them — breathing the 
while perhaps, if he bethink himself, a passing prayer that 
the gain to him will one day be proved to be worth the pain 
to it — he instantly stops its heart for a time. What pre- 
sumably happens is that the stimulus of the tap or touch is 
carried by the affected nerve to a nerve-centre in the brain 
near that centre from which a nerve to the heart proceeds, 
and so acts upon it in the result as to inhibit its pulsations. 
In fact, the experiment teaches that the physiological sym- 
pathy of nerve-centres in their intimate confederation in 
the nervous system is such that one centre, when stimulated 
to action, has the power to inhibit physically the function of 
another centre ; not much otherwise apparently than as an 
act of will inhibits the movements of breathing. 

This comparison of the temporary arrest of the heart's 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. Ill 

beat by an intercurrent stimulus into its reflex arc with the 
temporary arrest of respiration by an intercurrent stimulus 
into its reflex arc, will, without doubt, be repudiated by those 
who cannot conceive the action of will, even when it wears 
its most physical aspect, to have the least affinity to, or 
suffer the least comparison with, the action of a physiological 
stimulus. Between them they see a great gulf fixed. How- 
ever, if we look calmly and frankly at the facts, with a 
sincere desire to see them as they are, we perceive the gulf, 
though impassable directly, to be less formidable than it 
appears at first sight ; for we discover functions that, occu- 
pying an intermediate position between a physiological 
stimulus and will, certainly lessen much the gap between it 
and reflex function. 

Take, as first instance, the molecular commotion of a 
cerebral centre which in its subjective aspect we call an 
emotion : its explosion or discharge of energy notably affects 
violently the movements of the heart and of respiration, in 
a way the will cannot do. Does it in that case act by the 
unsearchable path of a metaphysical volition, or by the 
known physical paths of physiological inhibition ? Does 
the molecular commotion go by one path and the parallel 
emotion by another? If it be supposed that the rage of 
an Australian savage whose fish has been stolen from him, 
or of a speechless idiot that goes into uncouth convulsions 
of fury because another idiot has a piece of sugar given to 
it, is of too exalted a nature to be mentioned in the same 
breath with a purely physiological energy, it will be proper 
to go a step lower and to take for illustration a sensation. 
A sharp pain affects suddenly the movements of the heart 
and of respiration, independently of the will, which may 
be not only not consentient but actively dissentient ; and 
it is probable that the prick of a pin at the right moment 
would inhibit the most intense and eager complex reflex 
movements that a human being is capable of, though a snail 
or frog notoriously shows itself insensible to pricking or 
cutting when engaged in the physiological act entailing 
similar movements. Here we may fairly ask again whether 
we have not to do with reflex inhibition by physical paths 



112 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

and by physical agencies ; nor can we doubt what the reply 
ought to be, since there are physiological experiments to 
show that a stimulus that would cause pain to an animal, 
were it conscious of it, will still produce its particular effect 
upon movement when the removal of the creature's brain or 
the severance of its spinal cord has abolished sensation of 
the parts of the body concerned. The physical event then 
takes place, though no consciousness goes along with it. 

Without multiplying, as might easily be (Tone, striking 
instances of inhibitive function, by selecting them from the 
operations of the body both in health and in disease, it will 
be well to set down and emphasise the broad conclusions 
that are thus far warranted. They are these : first, that 
the nervous system has the power to execute through the 
proper muscular mechanism purposive acts, without any 
intervention of consciousness or will, and, secondly, that one 
nervous centre, when stimulated to activity, may so act upon 
another of the confederated centres as either to help, or to 
hinder, or to suspend its function by purely physiological 
mechanism — may, if it reach a certain pitch of ecstatic 
activity, so far inhibit other centres as to paralyse their 
functions for a time ; as we see in the examples of the pro- 
creating frog, of the religious ecstatic, of the soldier who 
feels not at the time the wound received in the transport of 
battle, and in many like instances. Behold then two purely 
bodily functions that run closely parallel to the rudiments of 
volition, and may well be their physiological equivalents — to 
wit, power to command execution of a purpose and power to 
stay execution. 

Having got these firm physiological bases, let us now 
proceed to examine the simplest instances of volition, as we 
meet with them in the animal and in the infant. For the 
right method is to start from the observation of its small and 
simple beginnings, and not to confuse and perplex oneself 
by peering introspectively into its highest displays in a much 
cultivated self-consciousness, where the difficulties of a suc- 
cessful analysis are insuperable. To build up a theory of 
will by leaving out of account the facts of its genesis and 
development, and the manifold varieties of particular wills in 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 113 

individual cases, is to construct an artificial philosophy that 
may serve well for intellectual gymnastics in scholastic 
exercises, but which has no bearing upon the concerns and 
doings of real life — upon the daily incomings and outgoings 
of men. That will is a power of better quality and higher 
dignity in man than in animal or infant admits of no 
question ; but that is an excellent reason why we ought to 
study the successive stages of its evolution from the lower to 
the higher level of being. When a young dog, in obedience 
to its natural impulse, seizes a piece of meat that lies near 
it and is whipped for the theft, or starts off in eager pursuit 
of a hare that jumps up in front of it and is sharply 
punished for its conduct, the memory of what it was made 
to suffer for yielding to instant desire intervenes on the next 
similar occasion between the impression on sight and the 
ensuing impulse, and checks or inhibits it. In like manner, 
when an infant, obeying its natural impulse to apprehend 
objects by grasping them, seizes hold of some bright object 
that attracts its gaze, and is burnt for its pains, it remembers 
its painful experience ; and the memory of the pain that it 
suffered intervenes to check or inhibit a like hasty movement 
on another occasion. Here, then, are two simple instances 
that are just as instructive as a thousand similar instances 
would be : the animal and infant has each voluntarily re- 
strained itself from doing what its first impulse was to do ; 
of two courses it has chosen the best — the path of enlightened 
prudence or duty in preference to the path of natural pro- 
clivity. You may complicate the business as much as you 
please by multiplying the experiences and reflections, till 
the outcoming will is the resultant of manifold, intricate, 
delicate, and circuitous interactions, but that alters not the 
fundamental character of the process; in the simple instances 
adduced we have the typical scheme of volition, the elemental 
units of the most .complex willing. 

Let us now proceed to consider the physical side of the 
process. What has happened there? In the first case, 
where the dog on seeing the meat seized it instantly, a 
particular impression on the sense of sight, the conduction 
of the molecular motion caused thereby to a special nerve- 



114 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

centre, and the consequent excitation of a special perception, 
as the ingoing process ; then, as the outgoing process, the 
transmission of liberated energy along motor nerve to muscle, 
and a consequent adaptive act : what we call a reflex process 
in the mental plane. In the second event, when the punish- 
ment was instantly inflicted upon the dog for yielding to its 
natural proclivity, there was the painful stimulation of 
another nerve-centre by the blows, with the appropriate 
motor outcome in writhings and howls, whence followed the 
association of the pain with the immediately preceding event. 
This close functional association of nerve-centres correspond- 
ing to the close contiguity of the events being effected — a 
subjective necessity reflecting the objective sequence — thence- 
forth the excitation of the first reflex process entails the 
excitation of the second. Accordingly, in the third case, 
where the dog withstood the impulse to snatch the meat, 
there was along with the special perception the immediate 
stimulation of the associated nerve-centre that had suffered 
and registered the memory of the suffering; and the conse- 
quence was the resistance to or inhibition of the instant 
impulse and the prevention of the movement. In other 
words, one of two catenated nerve-centres has been excited 
to inhibit the other. 

It is not difficult to conceive the multiplication of this 
simple scheme of associated centres — these physiological units 
of composition — and a corresponding increase in the number 
and intricacy of their connections ; for it is easy to conceive 
such a dynamically associated group of centres to become, in 
turn, the unit of further more complex groupings, and so on 
in multiplying complications ; and if we do that, we shall 
have a pretty fair general conception of the constitution of 
the brain, which contains actually a countless multitude 
of inter-connected nerve-centres, of high and low dignity, 
arranged in the same layer and in superimposed layers, 
functionally differentiated, and ready to be stirred into action 
by suitable stimulation to increase, to combine, to restrain, 
to neutralise, to modify in unknown ways one another's 
function. We might perhaps assist conception by thinking 
of it as a sort of 'Bradshaw's Bail way Guide,' the many thin 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 115 

and closely printed leaves of which, covered with a multitude 
of seemingly unintelligible figures and hieroglyphics, might 
well appear to be without significance, or to have significance 
lost in an overwhelming complexity ; nevertheless, when they 
are understood, these figures, not one of which has not its 
proper place and meaning, tell the times of starting, the 
stoppages, the junctions, the destination, and the times of 
arrival of every train on every line in the country ; they tell 
us, in fact, almost the exact place of every train on every 
line at a given moment, and so exhibit the clearest order in 
what, could we compass the whole, spread out like a map, 
in a bird's-eye view, would seem an intricate mass of confused 
movements beginning nowhere and ending nowhere. So is it 
with the brain and its multitudinous stations, tracks, junctions 
and branch lines, its quick trains and slow trains of thought. 
For as counterpart, on the mental side, of the exceeding com- 
plexity of physical structure we have always more or less 
complex deliberation going before the formation of will ; 
which comes out at last from the intricate and circuitous 
interactions of so many hopes, fears, inclinations, desires, 
promptings, reflections — of so many constituent elements of 
the individual character— that we are utterly unable to 
analyse them successfully, and so to specify accurately the 
exact factors in the complex composition of forces which 
the particular will is the resultant of. It seems a perfectly 
legitimate conclusion, then, that in the inhibitory action of 
one nerve-centre upon another, as known by physiological 
observation and experiment, and in the simplest instances of 
volition, as known by self-consciousness, we have two pro- 
cesses that run parallel — parallel in simplicity when they 
are simple, parallel in ascending complexity and intricacy 
when they are complex. 

Keverse the conception of a complex nervous system 
built up step by step by ascending multiplication and com- 
binations of simple factors, and imagine the successive re- 
movals, in a descending scale, of the more complex superim- 
posed parts : each more simple type, as its level was reached 
in the process of denudation, would find its normal repre- 
sentative in the descending orders or genera of the animal 



116 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

kingdom, until we reached in the descent our basal ele- 
mental type or unit of composition, which we find realised 
in the lowest creatures that possess a nervous tissue, and in 
the lowest examples of nerve-function in the higher animals. 
And assuredly we should find functions less and less complex 
running parallel to the more and more simple structure: 
complex will giving place to less complex, and this in turn 
to simpler volition still ; simple volitions replaced by obscure 
desires and instincts ; instincts by simple reflex acts, and 
reflex acts in the end by simple irritability of tissue. The 
unravelling of the complicated web of structure would be the 
progressive simplification of function and the gradual wan- 
ing of consciousness. It would be a plain demonstration of 
the exact parallelism of structure and function. 

Throughout the foregoing exposition there has been 
assumed on the part of a nerve-centre, once stimulated to 
function, the capacity to retain something of the effects of 
that stimulation, whereby it puts into after-action that 
which it has gained by reason of its first action. This capa- 
city of retention, which is the foundation of the mental 
faculties called acquisition, retention, recollection, is a purely 
physiological property, essentially independent of conscious- 
ness, and operative whether memory goes along with it or 
not ; and it is by virtue of it that, as previously pointed out, 
structure is moulded along the lines of function and that 
the ease of performance which we call habit is acquired. 
We have to take notice and to bear well in mind that this 
registration takes effect in the organic grouping of centres 
that have acted together, as well as in the modification of 
the particular centre; and that in such capacity it is the 
foundation — first, of the association of centres and their cor- 
responding ideas, and, afterwards, when that has been made 
very close and firm, of the integration of ideas, so that simple 
ideas unite to form complex ones and in the result several 
come to act almost as one. A statical grouping of centres 
is the foundation of a dynamical association of functions; 
and this process of primary groupings into secondary more 
complex groupings, and of these in turn into still more com- 
plex groupings, goes on through all the manifold plexuses of 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 117 

thought; a complex mechanism of thought being thus 
formed step by step — a true mental organisation — that may 
be in function or at rest, in part or whole. No wonder that 
we are unable at any moment to recollect more than an 
infinitesimal part of that which is stored in the so-called 
chambers of memory, and are not even conscious that it is 
there. We have collected it and laid it by, duly classified — 
that is to say, arranged and fixed it in its proper organic 
groupings ; but we cannot re-collect it and use it in cogita- 
tion unless it is stirred into activity through established 
links of associations, or by the stroke of some chance-impres- 
sion in its close neighbourhood. Note here an apt example 
how the derivation of words helps to elucidate the origin and 
the growth of their meanings ; for the word cogo, to collect, 
becomes the basis of the words recollect and cogitation, and 
these words in turn have been the foundations of the meta- 
physical faculties of cogitation and recollection. 

If we could imagine human beings to have been con- 
structed just as they are, with the one exception that they 
were without consciousness, and to have been placed in ex- 
actly similar circumstances to those in which they have been 
placed, we may be sure, I think, that their doings would 
have exhibited a logical connection ; that in the synthesis of 
impressions made upon them, and in the deductions of con- 
formable action, there would have been implicit that which, 
when illuminated by consciousness, we call reason. No or- 
ganic being could live and thrive without having some sort 
of synthesis, though an entirely unconscious one, of the world ; 
it is implicit in every purposive reflex act, which is itself vir- 
tually an unconscious judgment and the basis of conscious 
judgments. It is from this solid standpoint that the ways 
and doings of animals and savages ought to be studied. 
They are examples of reason latent or implicit in adaptive 
organic function, and they do not necessarily postulate the 
bright consciousness with which we illuminate them when 
reflecting on them. The reason is rooted in the mechanism, 
not in the light by which consciousness reveals its operations: 
the conscious theory is the transcript, not the original. It 
is because of the erroneous method of reading into the minds 



118 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

of low savages the information of a highly developed self- 
consciousness that the elaborate expositions of the original 
beliefs of mankind, or of the primitive data of their beliefs, 
which some philosophers have undertaken, are so easy, so 
empty often, and sometimes positively ludicrous ; they are 
applications of the acquired beliefs of evolution to explain 
the genesis of themselves ; deductions of the primitive states 
of human thought, feeling and conduct from the much-im- 
portuned consciousness of a philosopher, who imagines how 
he would have felt and thought and done had he been a 
primitive specimen of the race instead of its crown and con- 
summation. If his philosophy has not been learnt practi- 
cally and consolidated by living and working among men in 
the affairs of common life, but has been pumped out of him- 
self in the arm-chair of his librae, he will propound you 
thin theories suited to all difficulties ; and the final explan- 
ation of all things by him shall be so lucid and complete 
that the only wonder is God required so many as six days 
in order to create the heavens and the earth and all that 
therein is. 

All life, including the highest thought-life of the brain, 
has two sides that necessarily co-exist, namely, a plastic or 
nutritive side, and a disruptive or functional side ; and these 
correspond respectively to composition and decomposition of 
substance, to analysis and synthesis. The synthesis is again 
of two sorts : a chemical manufacturing of the material 
whereby it is made suitable substance ; and a morphological 
distribution of it in structure, a building of it into definite 
and special forms. In like manner, the analysis is of two 
sorts : the liberation of energy from chemical decomposition 
of substance; and the definite character of the liberated 
energy, its unity of special function, according to the par- 
ticular structural form which undergoes disruption or reso- 
lution, so to speak. The dualistic doctrine of a separate 
mind is therefore based upon an artificial and impossible 
separation of the two necessarily co-existent sides of thought- 
life, namely, the plastic and the functional. That is what 
physiology says ; and it says, moreover, as a plain matter of 
experience, that there is not a single bodily phenomenon 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 119 

that has not its sufficient determining conditions in an 
antecedent state of the body. Where has free choice or will 
a place in these events ? 

Those who admit that physical and mental events go 
along together as exactly parallel phenomena, so that in 
describing them, were they both thoroughly known, we 
might very well be describing one in terms of the other, or 
the same thing in different languages, and who nevertheless 
bring the correspondences, so exact and constant up to an 
unknown point, to an abrupt end by the arbitrary interven- 
tion of freewill, should endeavour to go deeper than they do 
into the inmost and most intimate physical facts, and to 
imbue their minds with fitting conceptions of their necessary 
order. They may well consider, among other things, that 
the time-rate of a volition is a measurable process ; that it 
varies in different persons, and in the same person at dif- 
ferent times, according to varying bodily conditions ; and 
that it may be experimentally lowered by lowering the 
temperature of the centre in which it is generated. What 
room then for a metaphysical intervention, what need of it, 
what result of it? From the physiological standpoint we 
may say confidently that it is not wanted, that there is no 
place for it, and that, if it be, it always lets the result go as 
if it were not. To assert its intervention anywhere or at 
any time before the physical antecedents of a volition, or 
between them and the volitional outcome, certainly is not 
psychology but psychogeny ; it is therefore doctrine which 
may properly be relegated to the domain of cosmogony. 

In two matters — those too matters in which the questions 
admit of being put with exceptional exactness and might 
claim therefore plain answers — we fail to get from the 
philosophical upholders of freewill a frank, definite, and 
consistent statement of their opinions. The first is the 
exact moment or point of evolution in the animal or the 
human series where the undetermined will makes its first 
appearance, since it is not generally assumed by them to be 
co-extensive with volition. Do they or do they not believe 
that God, having created man in His own image, endowed 
him with the ultra-physical power, so that all men — serfs, 



120 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

savages, philosophers, idiots and lunatics — always possess it 
and always have possessed it? Observe that it is not a 
question of the widely different degrees of development of 
the same kind of volition — if it were that, we could compre- 
hend what was meant — but a question of the abrupt ir- 
ruption somewhere, no one saying exactly where, of an 
extraordinary ultra-physical factor. Are they thereupon 
willing to maintain, in opposition to the overwhelming 
evidence of facts, that animal volition is of essentially dif- 
ferent kind from the lowest human volition, no animal pos- 
sessing jot or tittle of ultra-physical essence ? Or did the 
ass of Eden sin against freewill by eating forbidden thistles, 
and so, sharing in man's fall, come to incur all the sufferings 
that it has since patiently undergone from him? 

The second point respecting which it is hard to get a 
definite and consistent answer is whether the freedom of 
choice that is supposed to go before free action of will has, 
as every other mental phenomenon confessedly has, a material 
equivalent in a particular brain-action. If it has, where 
is the ultra-physical freedom; if not, where is the ultra- 
physical intervention? Apparently one is required to be 
vaguely content to allow the antecedents and outcome of a 
volition to take place practically as physical events, and to 
admit that they take place in exact and even compulsory 
correspondence with a series of motives and a resultant will, 
so long as it is acknowledged theoretically that the ultra- 
physical factor exists in the background, and is capable of 
intervening in the rarely or never occurring event of its 
being called upon to do so. An actual intervention is not 
insisted upon in any particular case, if only it be granted 
generally that it may take place if it wills or pleases : the 
chain of events is practically compulsory, but theoretically 
it may be broken and pieced again at any link. To refuse 
compliance with so modest a request may appear ungracious, 
when compliance seems to cost so little ; but none the less 
would the acknowledgment be an implicit avowal that 
causation does not reign in human events, and that a science 
of human mind must always be metaphysical nescience. 

It is remarkable how little the advocates of a meta- 



IIS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 121 

physical soul, though never so exacting in their critical 
demands upon materialistic theories, ever think of the many 
difficulties of their own theory, and how quietly they pass 
them by as parts of the big mystery which they feel no 
obligation to explain or even to consider. If a soul is to be 
postulated, surely one is entitled to be told something about 
it. Of what substance is it made, because substance of some 
sort it must have if it is individual? If of spiritual 
substance, what conception of spirit is possible other than a 
conception of something that is more subtile than the most 
subtile matter known? Where was this spirit before it 
entered into the body, and at what precise moment of 
its development, when it was yet in the womb, did it take 
possession of it ? In what part of the body does it dwell ? 
Is it co-extensive with body, and yet itself without extension ? 
Will it, when it takes leave of the body, be able to feel and 
think and will in the same manner as it does now through 
the body ? And if not, how will it keep consciousness of its 
identity and have continuity of existence as the same being ? 
How does it now act upon the body, and how is it acted 
upon by it ? How many bodily functions are possible without 
it, and what is its part and exact range in those functions 
that are not possible without it? Do the animals that 
approach nearest to man possess souls, especially those that 
in some measure think with him, feel with him, and act with 
him ; and if they do, whence came their souls before life, and 
where will they go after death? Is the animal soul material, 
and the human soul immaterial ? Are we called upon to make 
three divisions of substances in nature corresponding to dif- 
ferences of properties — the two last of them being sorts of 
spiritualisations of matter — namely, (a) gross and palpable 
material substance ; (b) animal and quasi-immaterial ; (c) 
human immaterial ? 

That other persons feel as I do, I know by their cries and 
gestures when they are pained or pleased, and that they 
think as I do, by their words which they have taught me to 
understand; in both cases, that is, by certain movements 
that are visible or, so to speak, audible to me. I know the 
same of animals so far as gestures and cries inform me, 
9 



122 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

which are, after all, more genuine indications of mental 
affections than words ; and certainly I feel quite as sure that 
the crouching, fawning, gambolling dog is expressing emo- 
tional states as I am that a gambolling child or any one who 
tells me he feels them is. What then am I to think of their 
respective origins 9 That the same kind of sensation, senti- 
ment, and reason proceeds from entirely unrelated sources in 
the two cases — in the one betokening a soul, and in the other 
being the outcome of matter divinely adapted to perforin such 
high functions ? And if matter be in any case sufficient by 
itself to perform them, why call in the superfluous aid of a 
soul to do the same kind of functions in men? If it be 
argued that the soul of man stands high on a quite special 
platform, because it has the subjective certainty of an intui- 
tion into its own states, still the objection may be made that 
the revelations of my self-consciousness can only have indi- 
vidual certainty, and that the intuitions of another person's 
self-consciousness, however certain to him, and by whatever 
outward means communicated from his within, who is to me 
without, to my within, can only have the same sort of objec- 
tive value to me as the revelations of an animal's conscious 
states through its modes of communication with me. A 
subjective psychology, in so far as it is subjective, cannot 
transcend the personal range, or have more than personal 
certainty. 

These and many like questions and objections might 
easily be propounded in order to provoke the metaphysicians 
to a searching examination of the weak points of their own 
doctrine, or at any rate in order to abate the elation with 
which they denounce the weaknesses of materialism and 
usurp for spiritualism an impregnability of position which it 
has not. As life, however, offers much too much to do, and 
only a short time to do it in, any one whose instincts are 
practical will pass them by as matters of idle and endless 
controversy. Accepting the exact parallelism which there is 
the best reason to believe to exist between physiological 
processes, made known by the senses, and mental processes, 
made known by self-consciousness, he will make it his 
scientific aim to trace out patiently the exact correspondences 



ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 123 

between the two, and so to arrive at such a precise and full 
knowledge of both as to be able to say with certitude : This 
physiological state of things being manifest to observation, 
of necessity this psychological experience will be sensible to 
consciousness ; and to say that of every mental function of 
the brain and of every affection of consciousness. Those 
who are alive when that day^ comes, may then rightly say, 
after the manner of Spinoza, that the brain is visible mind 
and the mind invisible brain.* Meanwhile, as we of this day 
and generation are not likely to reach that fulness and 
exactness of knowledge, it will be wise not to describe the 
objective aspect of mental events in terms of the subjective, 
nor the subjective in terms of the objective indifferently, but 
to keep their respective languages apart ; aiming only to 
bring about as close and exact a correspondence between the 
descriptive languages as we discover between the external 
facts of observation and the internal facts of consciousness. 
This we may do without being such exacting pedants as to 
be offended with expressions like the wail of the winds, tlie 
murmur of the water, the sighing of the breeze, the joy and 
the melancholy of nature : expressions which, after all, 
bespeak a truth of unity that is deeper than knowledge. 



SECTION II. 

CONCERNING THE NOTION OP NECESSITY. 

Before I proceed to further considerations of a physiolo- 
gical kind respecting will, I pause by the way at this fitting 
halting place in order to make a reflection about necessity. 
As most people discuss the so-called freedom of will as an 
abstraction, without being in good earnest to test their con- 
clusions by a rigid application to the concrete case, and so 
to get an exact apprehension of what they really mean, 
satisfied to rest in the vague, and invariably falling back 



124 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

upon the bare dogma whenever they are confronted with 
practical difficulties ; so likewise do they transform necessity 
into a sort of abstract despotic entity, and look upon it as a 
sternly binding tie, an inexorable fate, in all operations of 
nature from which freewill is excluded. It seems to be an 
invincible tendency of the human mind thus to make enti- 
ties out of abstractions ; for materialists display it, equally 
with metaphysicians, since they talk of matter (which 
is purely an abstraction) and discuss its operations, as if it 
were a real thing and had existence apart from its manifold 
varieties. If a man's will be not free, we are supposed to 
conclude that he is under the dominion of this irresistible 
compulsion, this fateful necessity, and not a responsible 
agent; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or 
blame, since he could not will but as he must, and could not 
have done otherwise than as he did, whatever he did. Cer- 
tainly he could not have done otherwise than as he did on 
that occasion, but he is not therefore f atebound to do the 
same on another occasion. 

Necessity has not objective existence any more than a 
smell has objective existence ; it is merely the general ex- 
pression or statement of all human experience that definite 
antecedents are invariably followed by definite consequences : 
a declaration of invariable uniformity, the opposite concep- 
tion to which is not freedom but contingency. It is a law 
of nature, and therefore a necessity, that the sun rises day 
after day ; but time was when the sun did not rise on human 
doings, nor at all, and there will be a time happily when it 
will not rise on them any more, nor rise at all. General 
laws are not outward realities, but our notional relations to 
outward realities. Change the antecedents of a choice of 
will, as a person does when he profits by experience, and 
where is the necessity? He is now under the necessity 
that his past acts have made for him to follow the changed 
antecedents. The man who walks to the cliff one day in 
order to commit suicide and does not do it, and walks to 
the cliff another day and does do it — other things being the 
same — would not have done it the second time had it been 
the first, and would have done it the first time had it been 



CONCERNING THE NOTION OF NECESSITY. 125 

the second. The dog which, obeying its instinct, starts 
in chase of the hare, is under the necessity to do as it 
does on the first occasion ; it is under the necessity to do 
differently on the second occasion, if it suffered pain for 
what it did on the first and does differently in consequence. 
According to the existing order of nature, a stone dropped 
from a height into space must fall to the ground : it is under 
that necessity. But it is not an absolute and variable neces- 
sity ; it is a necessary law only so long as it is not interfered 
with by the operation of some intervening law ; and when 
we say that the stone is compelled to fall downwards by the 
law of gravitation, all we do really is to make a general 
statement of universal experience that heavy bodies do fall 
to the earth at a certain rate, unless they are prevented. 
Accordingly, when we observe that a piece of iron does not 
drop to the ground if a strong magnet be suspended just 
above it, but is drawn upwards to the magnet and held fast 
by it in opposition to the pull of gravitation, we are not in 
dismay because a fatal necessity has been outraged and de- 
posed, and the world is likely to fall into universal anarchy ; 
but we set to work forthwith to collect and collate our expe- 
riences of the operations of the intervening power, and to find 
out and formulate the most general statement that we can 
concerning them — that is, to formulate the so-called law of 
its action. Not so, says perhaps the necessitarian, that is not 
quite all, there is something more than the mere statement 
of a uniformity of experience ; for it certainly is a necessity 
that all bodies tend towards earth if they do not actually 
reach it ; they have no choice, no alternative in the matter ; 
and if they are prevented, it is that they are suffering a 
restraint of their natural tendency. 1 But the truth is that 
the piece of iron, magnet-attracted, tends the other way ; it 
makes another choice, doing what is most agreeable to its 
nature in the circumstances ; it obeys the temporary attrac- 

1 In this use of the word tendency to connote a sort of spontaneity in a 
body's gravity we remark a relic of the metaphysical interpretation of nature 
which imbued it with sympathies and antipathies, loves, and abhorrences, &C. 
We might as well talk of the chemical yearnings of one element for another, 
or imitate the scientist who, lecturing before a royal personage, said : ' These 
gases will now have the honour to combine before your Royal BighneM.' 



126 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

tion of the stronger motive. So an individual, if lie be free 
from constraint, wills what lie wishes, and wishes what is 
most agreeable to his nature in the then circumstances, and 
is most free in doing so. 

Except in the far greater number and complexity of the 
circumstances, is there any real difference between the 
choice that a man makes between two courses of action 
when he is in doubt and the choice that the piece of iron 
makes between falling to the earth and rushing to the 
magnet? It is possible to imagine it placed, though im- 
possible to place it, so nicely between the attraction of the 
earth and the counter-attraction of the magnet that it 
shall be held suspended in doubt, in an equilibrium of choice, 
unable to resolve which way to go, like a man between two 
evenly balanced motives, or like the legendary ass fixed 
exactly half way between the two exactly similar bundles of 
hay. If it be true, when the man decides, that his freewill 
has put an end to the difficulty for him by giving the 
requisite preponderance to the attraction of one of the 
opposing and equal motives ; and if it be true that the ass 
may count on its freewill to prevent it from standing still 
until it is starved to death, notwithstanding the exact 
equipoise of motives ; why is it not true also that it is the 
freewill of the piece of iron that determines it either to rush 
to the magnet or to drop to the ground, since it is practi- 
cally impossible to balance the counteractions so nicely as 
to keep it in suspense between them? And if the least 
change, a change so trifling that we cannot even fix and 
appreciate it, was enough in that case to give the preponde- 
rance in one direction, and to move it from the ideal centre 
of indifference, is it any wonder that in a far more subtile 
province of matter we cannot always apprehend and measure 
the slight change that gives the preponderance to one or 
another motive in the complex workings of human volition ? 

In the objective necessity which it has created the 
human mind has transformed its subjective experience into 
objective being ; but the necessity so created is really, like 
space or time, only a condition or form of thought, a sub- 
jective necessity. Feeling necessity in itself, as it needs 



CONCERNING THE NOTION OF NECESSITY. 127 

must, since it cannot help thinking two thoughts together 
that have always occurred together, co-existent or sequent, 
it has made it a despotic entity outside itself. Because it is 
bound to think a co-existence or sequence, it objectifies the 
necessity. So far as we can think of nature apart from man, 
or of man apart from nature, and so far as we can touch a 
real-in-itself in either of the two ideals — liberty and necessity, 
we are well entitled to say that there is far more necessity 
in man than in nature, and far more freedom in nature than 
in man. Let it be acknowledged, then, that we know no 
other necessity in nature than the necessity which we make 
in formulating our experience, and that it will last just as 
long as our experiences are as they are, and no longer. 
Could these experiences become wider to-morrow and reach 
a higher plane of being, any so-called law of nature might 
be contravened and shattered ; and were our modes of re- 
lation with external nature changed fundamentally — by the 
acquisition of a quite new sense yielding quite new expe- 
riences, or, better still, by the opening in us of half a 
dozen new senses revealing new worlds of experience — then 
our fundamental laws of thought would be changed also, 
our universal categories revolutionised ; and our necessities 
of to-day, the eternal verities we swear by now, would 
show beside the eternal verities we should swear by then 
like the painful gropings of a blind man beside the quick, 
apt and easy movements of one who has his perfect sight. 
A race of men that was both blind and deaf would go very 
quietly about its business without being disturbed in the 
least by the crash of thunder or the flash of lightning ; but 
it would not therefore follow that thunder and lightning 
were not real things to another race more amply furnished 
with senses. Are there no stars in heaven because the eye- 
less polype cannot see them ? Is there no law of gravitation 
because the brainless oyster does not apprehend it ? Is the 
world without moral feeling because the octopus is insensible 
to it ? Is there no music of the spheres because c this muddy 
vesture of decay doth grossly close us in ' that we cannot 
hear it? An atom in immensity, a moment in eternity, a 
single pulse, so to speak, in the flux of life upon earth, man 



128 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

cannot transcend the narrow limits of his small capacities ; 
can only reflect in knowledge more or less adequately the 
minute spot of space, the brief moment of time, in which he 
is ; can know little more in the end than how exceeding 
little it is that he can ever know, how infinitely much he 
can never know. ' Where wast thou when I laid the founda- 
tions of the earth ? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of 
Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion ? ' All which by in- 
terpretation is that man cannot go outside the vibrations of 
matter to which he is constitutionally sensible, and tell us 
anything of that which occasions no answering vibrations in 
him. 



SECTION III. 

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 



In pursuit of the purpose to get as close as possible to the 
life of mind, that is to say, to its actual relations as a vital 
phenomenon, let me now point out that no one's mind is an 
individuality in the sense of independence and separateness 
which we commonly attach to the conception of individuality. 
The mind in truth is not an independent, perfectly distinct, 
self-sufficing being, any more than the body. It is continuous 
and dependent ; for it is a becoming from the basis of all human 
past through the means of an essential co-operation of 
surroundings ; and it is for this reason that it can only be 
adequately studied and thoroughly known (a) historically, 
and (b) in relation to its surroundings. These are the 
methods of a fruitful psychology; for it is in those two 
relations that mind can, properly speaking, be said to have 
being and to be capable of scientific investigation. It is 
plain enough that the body cannot live and be without food 
and air and warmth : to talk of a living body as an indivi- 
duality apart from its external medium, is to talk of an 
abstract conception, a notional existence, not of a real thing. 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. ]29 

Every element of tissue requires what Lamarck calls its 
ambient medium, and could not be a living element of tissue, 
or even a lasting element of non-living tissue, without it. 
Life is the expression of the fit relations of the organisation 
and its environing conditions ; the result, that is to say, of 
the interactions of a part of nature combined or organised 
into a certain complex form and of the outside nature with 
which it is in essential relation. The organism, acting on 
nature to modify it, and in turn acted upon by nature and 
modified — made by circumstances for circumstances — is 
itself nature ; one of an infinite multitude of temporary in- 
carnations of matter that in a little while will fall to 
pieces and go back to the main body. 

Many of those who talk with easy fluency of the organism 
adapting itself to its environment, are apt to let the mouth- 
filling words fill the mind too and so hinder an exact appli- 
cation of thought to facts. In the first place, they are 
dwelling too much on one aspect of the relation, and are 
thus using language which, so far as it has meaning, 
means only a partial truth, since it would perhaps be as 
true to talk of the environment adapting itself to the organ- 
ism; and in the second place, they easily demoralise 
themselves by treating the vague doctrine as if it were 
itself what is intended by it, instead of making it real 
knowledge by patiently investigating and disclosing the 
processes of the particular adaptations ; until, growing in in- 
flation, they are content with such knowledge of life as is 
implied in talking of it as adjustment of internal relations 
to external relations. No doubt there is in the phenomena 
of life the adjustment of internal to external relations, as 
there is in them the relation of a somethingness to a some- 
thin g-elseness ; but it may be permitted to doubt whether 
either proposition is a very valuable addition to knowledge, 
and, if it were a question between the two, whether the latter 
has not the .more solid and substantial meaning. 

As it is with the body so is it with mind, which is the 
flower of its function, the supreme expression of its life. It 
also is the outcome of the organism and its environment, 
and could no more be without the ambient medium than it 



130 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

could be without the organism. Certainly it has require- 
ments beyond those of the body; it requires not only the 
physical medium that the body requires, but it needs also 
a social medium; deprived of this essential element of its 
being, it could no more live than the body could live deprived 
of air. That is what we mean when we define man as a 
social being. He lives only as a unit of a social organisation, 
in vital relations to it, acting upon it and acted upon by it, 
inspiring and breathing its social spirit ; he could not live 
and move and have his human being separate from it, any 
more than he could live and move in a vacuum, or than a 
nerve-cell could live detached from its plexus in the brain. 
As the air is the breath of his body, which without it would 
be dead, so the social medium is the life-breath of his mind, 
which without it would not wake to consciousness. No one 
can help assimilating unawares the moral atmosphere of the 
medium in which he is ; he will feel and be as he lives ; and 
so it comes to pass that persons who, like thieves, have 
renounced all the obligations of common morality are still 
imbued with a sort of ' honour-among-thieves'-morality, the 
obligations of which they own, and that persons of an 
average standard of general morality are sometimes no 
better than criminals in respect of some special relations of 
their particular sect, trade, or other social circle to the rest 
of society. There is nothing that is thought natural which 
may not be made to seem unnatural, nothing that is un- 
natural which may not be made natural, by long usage and 
custom. 

In order to elucidate further the essential relations of 
being that hold between the living element and its medium, 
it will be well to glance at the transformations which matter 
has undergone on earth — to endeavour to apprehend the 
meaning of its successive transpeciations. Time was when 
no life existed on earth; it is now filled with the most 
complex forms of life, which have succeeded to more simple 
and general forms ; the mutations of living matter having 
been on a scale of increasing complexity, and new manifesta- 
tions of energy having accompanied the successive complica- 
tions. Going below life to non-living matter, we trace a 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 131 

similar progressive complication as we pass upwards in 
knowledge from simple chemical combinations of elements 
to complex combinations, and from these again to more 
complex combinations still, until we reach that exceeding 
complexity of composition in a small compass which exists 
in, and constitutes the basis of, living matter'. Thereupon, 
making this simplest living element the starting point of a 
new ascent, we rise from it through successive complications 
of organic matter — from the gelatinous and scarcely ani- 
malised substance of such creatures as the polypes and the 
infusoria — which, as Lamarck observes, has little more than 
the consistence and colour of water, and is incapable of making 
a soup that would be nourishing and strengthening to man 
— to the more complex and highly animalised flesh of birds 
and mammals. 1 And not in substance only, bat in structure 
and form also, we note the same manner of progress through 
multiplying complexities and specialisations from simple 
forms of organism, seemingly homogeneous in substance, to 
the most complex organisms with their varieties of elemental 
tissues, their intricate combinations of tissues into organs, 
and their intimate physiological union of organs. There 
has been a progressive exaltation of matter, a more and 
more complex involution of it, an ascending transpeciation, 
so to speak, as the foundation and condition of that process 
of a higher becoming of things which we call evolution : in 
fact, it comes to this in the intimate and essential relations 
of organic and inorganic nature, that there is not an organised 
living creature that does not presuppose and, as it were, 
involve the whole history of the earth antecedent to it. 
Therefore, instead of being satisfied with one process of so- 
called evolution, we ought perhaps rather to recognise, 

1 ' La chair et le sang des mammiferes et des oiseaux sont les matieres les 
plus compos6es et les plus animalis6es que Ton puisse obtenir des parties 
molles des animaux; aussi, apres les poissons, ces matieres se degradent progres- 
sivement au point que dans les radiaires mollasses, dans les polypes, et surtout 
dans les infusoires, le fluide essentiel n'a plus que la consistance et la couleur 
de l'eau et que les chairs de ces animaux n'offrent plus qu'une matiere 
gelatineuse, a peine animalisee. Le bouillon que Ton ferait avec de pareilles 
chairs ne serait, sans doute, guere nourrissant et fortifiant pour l'homme qui en 
ferait usage.' — Lamarck, Philosophic zoologique, vol. i. p. 216. 



132 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

investigate, and describe three processes — namely, (a) In- 
volution, (b) Evolution, and (c) Dissolution; which processes, 
though three when viewed in relation to individual parts, 
are not three, but three aspects of one process, when viewed 
in relation to the embracing whole. 1 

Two leading facts, then, and for us ultimate facts, which 
it behoves us to apprehend and firmly fix in mind, are — first, 
that there has been what we may call a nisus of evolution in 
nature, and, secondly, that progressive transpeciations of 
matter have been events of it. Continuity of nature certainly, 
but as certainly not of kind in nature ; for the continuity is 
of different kinds, therefore in some sort a discontinuity, a 
new kind springing from the basis of the old kind : not con- 
tinuity by homogeneous but by heterogeneous generation. 
A new chemical compound with new properties was a new 
thing when it appeared first ; though it presupposed the ele- 
ments that united to form it, and therefore had a continuity 
of being with them, its new function was not the sum or 
mechanical effect of the co-operation of their properties; 
it was quite a special power that might properly be said 
to have its autonomy or, so to speak, its spontaneity. It is 
vain to ask why it is so ; we must observe what has taken 
place, accept that as ultimate, and be satisfied to trace how 
it is so. In like manner must we accept as ultimate facts 
other steps in the transpeciation of matter and energy : 
organic matter from that which is not organic, life from 
not-life, reason and will from sensibilities that are not 
reason and will, sensibility from simple irritability, con- 
sciousness from that which is not conscious ; for everywhere 
it is the same problem that meets us — namely, from the 
lower to make the higher, from that which is not to obtain 
that which is. It is no real inconsistency to accept two 
views that are sometimes opposed to one another as contra- 
dictory — namely, the opinion of the essential continuity of 

1 Lamarck enunciates the notion of involution as the complement of his 
doctrine of the transformation of species. The more carefully one reads his 
works, the more one realises with surprise what inadequate justice has yet 
been done to this great pioneer, who for so long a time was hardly known 
except by a ridiculous travesty of his doctrine. 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 133 

existences and events in nature, in simple virtue of the agency 
and properties of matter ; and the opinion that the so-called 
continuity is really a succession of creations through new 
involutions of matter. The process is not, properly speaking, 
an evolution, unless evolution be complemented by a worked- 
out theory of involution, but an epigenesis. Certainly the 
most exact and complete mathematics of quantity will not 
avail to explain qualities. 

At some vastly remote period of the world's history — a 
period so remote that the distance can hardly take definite 
form in a mental conception — non-living matter reached 
such a complexity of intimate combinations and was in such 
fitting external conditions that it underwent what was then 
an extraordinary transformation into living matter. Theo- 
logians will not care nowadays to dispute the transforma- 
tion, if it be granted that the event was the immediate work 
of divine interposition, a direct creative act. Once formed, 
living matter has the property of perpetuating and increas- 
ing itself by taking into itself non-living matter, converting 
it into its kind — assimilating it, as it is said — and so 
making it vital ; not otherwise than as a spark of fire, once 
it has with great pains been obtained, grows into a flame 
and continues to spread when it meets with suitable aliment. 
The ease and rapidity with which now is effected by living 
matter a transformation that took place only in the first 
instance by successive steps and, as it were, after long and 
slow preparations, must be attributed to the fact that the 
small vital particle contains in itself and supplies actually 
in its function the essential conditions of the transmutation 
which were then obtained only after many trials and chances, 
and by favour perhaps of a happy coincidence. So in un- 
known way it works a conversion to its nature by the infec- 
tion of its presence and influence. I use the example of a 
spark of fire not as an explanation, but as a comparison, in 
order to assist the conception of what takes place ; for as 
the fire raises the matter near it to such a temperature that 
it catches fire, or as an orator's enthusiasm so inflames the 
enthusiasm of his audience that they flare up ; so the particle 
of living matter contains, concentrated in its minute but 



134 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

complex compass, and supplies in its living energy, the con- 
currence of conditions necessary for the transformation of 
non-living aliment into its own living nature.^ On the one 
hand, then, those who see a miracle in the first appearance 
of living matter on the earth are bound to see a miracle in 
the history of each particle of dead matter which a living 
thing converts into its own nature ; on the other hand, those 
who see in the new event nothing more than an ordinary 
operation of matter, ought not to delude themselves by a 
misuse of the word ordinary to describe that which, when it 
took place for the first time, was certainly a very extra- 
ordinary operation of matter. 

The elements of the universe being what they are, the 
combination of them into a living molecule was inevitable at 
some time or another in some place or another. For if the 
number of these elements be finite and constant, and their 
properties everywhere the same, as our experience of them 
in suns and stars warrants us to believe they are, we have 
the right to suppose that an infinite number of combinations 
of them has taken place in the infinite time and space that 
have been available for such operations; and therefore it 
would follow that somewhere or other, at some time or other, 
there has been a realisation of every possible combination 
and development of matter. Not of chemical matter only, 
be it understood, but of matter in its highest known form as 
the substratum of sensation and thought ; for then, as now, 
in the evolutional ascent sensation must have* appeared with 
the attainment of a certain complexity of the fitting organi- 
sation, and thought of the same quality as exists now must 
have followed organic combinations having the same quali- 
ties as now. We do not discover the differential calculus in 
the Amoeba — indeed, we are persuaded that there was a 
time when the Amoeba was and the differential calculus was 
not; but we are perfectly sure that, the conditions of the 
earth having been what they were, the discovery of the 
differential calculus was inevitable some time in the chain 
of organic events. For anything we know to the contrary, 
nay conformably to the probabilities of all that we do 
know, it may have been discovered thousands of times in 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 135 

thousands of other planets ; in which in the course of an infi- 
nite past every possible composition of matter and every pos- 
sible conception of mind have very likely been realised over 
and over again. There and then, as here and now, those 
combinations of elements that were most stable would endure 
and become the basis of still more complex combinations, and 
so the whole series of events follow in inevitable order ; the 
differential calculus at the proper time, as certainly as the 
coming into being of an organic molecule when the fulness 
of its time was come. And seeing that organic matter, once 
it has come into being, sustains and increases itself by prey- 
ing upon other organic matter, there must needs ensue in 
due course all the horrible consequences of the struggle for 
existence on earth. What an overwhelming reflection! 
That the same animal ferocity in pursuing, killing and 
devouring through all the forms of animal life; the same 
human vices, miseries, cruelties and crimes that have filled 
the earth with groans and lamentations through untold 
ages ; the same inadequate notions and abortive struggles ; 
the same fruitless aspirations and prayers that have been 
little more than cries of conscious impotence; — that all these 
things have been many times in the infinite past of being, as 
the result of the same organic combinations that prevail 
on earth now, and prevail also perhaps at this moment in 
more than one of the infinite multitudes of worlds that are 
scattered through infinite space ! So may it be that when 
the high-souled poetic being gazes into the blue deep of 
heaven on a cloudless night, rapt away from things of earth 
in a transport of ineffable ecstasy, and is thrilled with mys- 
terious sympathies that bring him into sacred communion 
of spirit with something that he sees not, apprehends not, 
thinks not, but feels is there, he is experiencing the dim in- 
timations of a nearer kinship than he suspects. 

May we not discern a dim perception or vague adumbra- 
tion of this eternally recurring evolution and dissolution of 
worlds and beings in the old and widely spread doctrine of a 
transmigration of souls ? It was one of the traditions of the 
.Rabbins that those who had been the guiltiest of the guilty, 
and who had made themselves abominable in the sight of 



136 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

heaven by their sins, were chased round the world by evil 
spirits until the time decreed was accomplished. Then they 
sank into dust and ashes, the lowest depth of existence. 
Next, in another beginning of existence they became clay 
and took the nature of stone and of minerals ; and from 
thence they rose to become water, air and fire, floating in 
the cloud, rushing in the whirlwind, rolling in the thunder. 
After this they entered into vegetable existence, springing 
to life in grass and flowers, trees and shrubs. Ages on ages 
were consumed in these successive transformations ; for in 
them units of time-reckoning might well be, not by revolu- 
tions of planets, but by the births and deaths of solar sys- 
tems. The next change was into animal life, in which as 
beast, bird, reptile, fish and insect, in the waters, in the air, 
on the ground and underground, they pursue and are pursued, 
rend with tooth and claw and are rended, destroy and are 
destroyed, through countless seons. At last they are suffered 
to ascend into the rank of human beings v once more. But 
their ascent there is step by step : they are first slaves un- 
dergoing unspeakable toils, privations and tortures, so that 
their life is a long longing to die ; dying in full time, they 
commence life again in a higher rank, being free, but it is 
a hard life of toil, of poverty, of war, of dungeons, of bloody 
superstitions, of worship of idols, in abasement and ignor- 
ance. To them also in the end comes the release of death ; 
then the final change ensues, and they enter the highest 
rank of mankind, becoming Israelites, the chosen people to 
whom has been given the promise of universal dominion. 
The end is accomplished : the long cycle of the travail of 
matter through eternity has reached its climax, having cul- 
minated in the highest specimen of mankind — a good Jew. 
See the grim irony of events ! When Jesus Christ came, a 
Jew of the Jews, they rejected and crucified Him. 

Let us turn back to the main line of our inquiry. It 
has been shown that the lesson of material continuity with 
progressive complication, which is taught by the ascent from 
simple binary compounds to ternary compounds, from tern- 
ary compounds to still more complex compounds, and from 
these to the exceeding complex composition of nerve-element, 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 137 

is plainly taught also by the development of organic life. 
An organism and its medium, when they have reached a 
certain fitness of one to the other and hit upon the happy 
concurrence of conditions, combine, so to speak, to make a 
new start, the initial step of a more complex organism. 
This initial variation which, profiting by what is called 
natural selection, undergoes gradual development, is an 
original fact that we cannot explain. Call it an internal 
principle of evolution, if you will, though it is doubtful whether 
matters are made any more clear thereby. To call it an 
accidental variation is hardly well, since there is no such 
event as accident, and in any case that is ill called an 
accident which issues finally in such a definite and special 
product as a new organism : it is almost equivalent to call- 
ing man himself an accident. Natural selection affords us 
an explanation of the survival of the variation once it has 
been made, but no explanation of the organic start itself nor 
of its progressive increase. It is in the inmost depths of 
physiology, in the most intimate physico-chemical processes 
that take place between the internal properties of the 
organism and the external stimuli of the environment, that 
we must search for the origin of the initial variation and of 
its growth by exercise. All we know and understand at 
present is that it is the observed tendency of organic 
matter to break into varieties, thousands of which probably 
occur and come to naught, in the absence of fit surroundings 
to preserve them, for each one that survives and is fixed with 
the lapse of time. Everywhere we observe evidence of such 
variations : no two faces, no two voices, no two treads, no 
two objects in living nature are ever exactly alike ; in the 
phenomena of heredity the operation of a law of variation 
is as manifest as the operation of the law of inheritance of 
like qualities. What wonder that such variations occur 
often in the unstable and extremely plastic substance of 
nascent organic matter ? 

The initial structure of the new variation is an embodi- 
ment of the special conditions of the environment, an 
organic involution of them, and is therefore prepared by its 

nature to flourish in similar fitting conditions; for as the 
10 



138 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

living particle, once formed, contains in itself and supplies 
the essential conditions of the transformation of suitable 
non-living matter into its kind, so this new embodiment 
contains in its structure and supplies in its function the 
essential conditions of a further increase, and grows aptly 
to the mode of its exercise. That is the real meaning of 
Lamarck's doctrine that the want or need generates the 
effort, and the effort or exercise the faculty. The first step 
once made, the initial combination of organism and medium^* 
the increase will be comparatively easy, for here, as in 
morals, it is the first step only that costs ; it will increase, 
by reason of its embodied conditions, in external surround- 
ings that would not have been sufficient to generate it, 
although it will certainly perish in surroundings that are 
not adequately adapted to it ; as a fire will go out when it 
has not proper fuel, or as a gill-breathing animal will expire 
in the air. Notwithstanding this advantage of intrinsic 
structural conditions, however, it is* extremely probable that 
multitudes of variations are born only to fade timelessly, ' no 
sooner blown than blasted,' just as the great majority of all 
sorts of seeds come to naught; just as many bright thoughts 
not caught and fixed at the moment pass for ever ; just as 
among thousands upon thousands of stars and planets one 
only perhaps here and there comes to aught. To infinite 
Power, with infinite time and infinite space at its disposal, it 
is manifestly no greater matter to waste planets than to 
waste seeds. 

It is not a very profitable discussion whether function 
developes structure or structure developes function, as it is 
not a profitable discussion why the organism makes the first 
start of a new development which the surroundings after- 
wards nurse into completeness. Both questions seem to be 
based upon the notion of a living organism as an indi- 
viduality that has existence apart from its medium. In 
reality it has nothing of the kind. We make the abstrac- 
tion in thought, but there is no corresponding separation in 
nature. A similar discussion has been raised as to whether 
social morality is the basis of individual morality, or whether 
individual morality has preceded social morality ; as if indi- 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 139 

vidual morality could be at all except in relation to a social 
environment, or a society be without individuals. Morality 
would have no meaning to a man living alone on a planet 
which he had all to himself: he could not be virtuous there 
any more than a woman would be hysterical who was placed 
in similar circumstances ; or than a sole Supreme Being 
who has the universe to Himself can be virtuous or vicious. 

Let us endeavour to apprehend as closely as possible the 
formation of a new organic start. A structural variation 
appears, be it the most minutely initial imaginable. Certainly 
it could not, before it was formed, function as part of the 
organism, and must have preceded its function in the order of 
development, since function is the definite energy of structure 
of definite form ; that form being itself the result of the com- 
bining properties of the simple and complex compounds that 
constitute the structure in their relations to the environment. 
The unloosing of the energies of the compounds by their de- 
composition and the unified action of the liberated energy, 
as determined by the form of structure, will be the function. 
On the other hand, it is a sure matter of daily observation 
that structure grows to the mode of its exercise, and wastes 
when it is not exercised — that is to say, that function de- 
velopes structure in the line of its activity ; a plus replace- 
ment of expended organic material being growth, a minus 
replacement thereof waste. Here, then, we are brought to 
a pretty pass, which looks very like an impasse. We may 
be permitted to ask ourselves, however, whether at bottom 
anything more wonderful has happened than happened 
when a new chemical compound, or an organic molecule, 
was formed for the first time, which has ever since in- 
creased and multiplied. 

Nutrition is a succession of generations, and generation 
is fundamentally a continuance of nutrition. We need to 
get rid of the artificial separation that we make between 
organism and medium, and to cultivate the conception of an 
essential interaction. The proper influences or fitting co- 
incidences of the medium are as essential a part of the con- 
stitution of the new structural start as are the intrinsic 
conditions or properties of the organic structure from which 



HO WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

it proceeds; it is indeed the material embodiment, in the 
most complex and concentrated form, of the intrinsic organic 
conditions and of the extrinsic conditions of the medium — 
an involution, so to speak, of the two complex factors. 
Always is it necessary to have envelopment before you can 
have development, to fold in before you can unfold. The 
smallest particle of protoplasm that ever came into being, 
came into being through the union of immanent and influent 
conditions, and it grew afterwards by the continuance of a 
similar process of combination under vastly more favourable 
auspices ; but it was able to grow in that fashion from pre- 
ceding protoplasm only because the latter carried incorporate 
in its nature, as immanent properties, the antecedent influent 
external conditions that were necessary to its first produc- 
tion. The exercise of function being the giving out or un- 
loosing of those combined internal and external conditions, 
the unfolding from within, by a self-disintegration, of the 
coincident conditions within and without that combined 
in the first instance to form the new variation, these natu- 
rally promote further material embodiments — that is to say, 
further increase of structure. In regard of relative priority 
of appearance of structure and function then, the proper 
answer would perhaps be that the new function came first as 
the function of concurrent organism and medium, being 
more or less vague and tentative; and that the material 
embodiment in the initial variation, surviving by its fitness 
to the conditions, became the structural basis of definite, 
purposive, and less dependent function of the organism. 

It is easier to entertain the general notion of a process 
of involution than it is to put forth an intelligible exposition 
of it. Making use of every aid, in order, if possible, to make 
the conception clear and definite, I would particularly point 
out that in the formation of the primitive organic particle, 
and in each successive formation of more complex organic 
matter, a process has taken place that at bottom is 
identical with what we see going on and exemplified now 
in every conscious mental acquisition. For what happens 
in this case? Observation of the new conditions that 
present themselves, and in due course adaptive reaction 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 141 

to them ; such process, ingoing and outgoing, being at the 
foundation of the faculties we call perception and judgment; 
so we make a veritable assimilation of them, and therein a 
gain to ourselves of mental faculty. The process is gradual 
and tentative at first, but it becomes exact and perfect by- 
practice. Now the underlying condition of such acquired 
faculty or function certainly is an organic basis of gradually 
formed structure, the specialty of which structure is deter- 
mined by, embodies, and signifies the composite result of the 
internally immanent and the special externally influent 
conditions. Thus conscious function helps to throw light 
upon the dark and hidden processes of purely organic 
function, for it is with the increments and developments of 
the simple organic particle as it is at bottom with our mental 
increments and developments. 

The reaction of the simplest living matter to the external 
stimulus is simple and direct, but it is obvious that with each 
of those above-mentioned increments of gain, they being 
embodiments of simple reactions, the reaction becomes less 
direct and simple ; and it is further obvious that with 
successive additions, especially when the additions are deve- 
lopments, the reaction becomes more and more circuitous 
and complicated ; the determinants of action mainly within, 
the occasions without. The organism has become a maga- 
zine of embodied relations. In its structure are stored up 
potentially the multitudinous simple actions and reactions 
between organic substance and medium — ordered struc- 
turalisations that make its increasing complexity ; they 
are there ready to unfold in energy on the occasion of a slight 
and very indirect stimulus ; not otherwise than as the mind 
of a man of the world contains the gains of the experience 
by which he has profited on his way through life, and holds 
them in store ready for use when the occasion demands. A 
complex organism is the embodiment of such involutions 
from the beginning of life on earth to the beginning of its 
life. The spontaneities and autonomies, so-called, of organic 
structures and beings have been thus fashioned. If traced back 
to their genesis, if undone, so to speak, in the reverse order 
in which they were done, the research would bring us at last 



142 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

to the simple fact of the primitive action and reaction. In 
the least portion of an organic structure the immediate 
relation is immanent ; it can only be directly and openly 
dispensed with on any occasion of function, because it 
is, so to speak, capitalised there ; and it is by reason of 
such funded stores that an external stimulus that otherwise 
might seem slight and inadequate is adequate to produce 
large effects. 

The tendency at the present day is perhaps to lay undue 
stress on the environment as cause of the variations that 
take place in an organism, and in some respects the term 
' natural selection ' may have helped to enhance the 
tendency ; for the common notion of natural selection is apt 
to be that of an external active power which seizes on the 
organism and compels it to adapt itself in special ways. 
In reality, of course, natural selection merely expresses the 
fact that the organism survives which has made the fitting 
adaptation ; and it is exactly the adaptation that needs to be 
explained. Indeed, the word adaptation itself is one which, 
if used by theologians, would probably be condemned as 
being of anthropomorphic taint, and implying the application 
of conscious experience of human action to material events. 
To search out and discover the exact physico-chemical con- 
ditions and events of a particular process of adaptation — that 
is the real problem ; and the solution of it would be of more 
scientific value than volumes of vague disquisition concerning 
adaptation. It is necessary, in this relation, to be on guard 
against falling into the easy delusion that the application of 
new terms to old facts is an addition to our knowledge of 
the facts : evolution and environment, for example, are large 
words of swelling sound that seem to be charged with big 
meaning, but by themselves they really explain no more than 
the old expressions of the becoming of things amidst the 
things around them. The question is what are the exact 
facts that such general words signify ; and here it mast be 
confessed that an aching void of meaning often appears. 1 

1 Darwin established the doctrine of evolution on a scientific basis by 
infinitely patient labour of observation and thought ; but it has been the fate 
of his discovery, as it is the fate of most epoch-marking discoveries, to be 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 143 

If a complex organism embodies in its nature the en- 
vironments of all organism that come in the order of de- 
velopment between it and the simplest form of organism — if 
it be, so to say, a magazine of such involutions — so that in 
dealing with its external relations and internal correlations 
we are dealing with the historical incorporation of a multi- 
tude of past environments, it is obvious that a general state- 
ment of the action of the environment to produce a variation 
is too vague to have the smallest scientific value. Suppose 
some thousands of chemical compounds mixed together in 
states of highly unstable equilibrium, but having the ex- 
ternal formal equilibrium of an organism ; then suppose 
some impulse from without to upset the unstable equilibrium, 
so that the compounds go instantly into a turmoil of decom- 
pounding, recompounding and new compounding, some in 
more, others in less stable combinations; what an empty 
pretence of information it would be to say that the possible 
multitude of ensuing new combinations and the consequent 
modification of the external relations of the formal whole 
were due, in any direct sense, to the influence of the en- 
vironment ! And yet we have made the supposition of a 
state of things falling far short of that which prevails in a 
complex organism ; for such organism is a formal equilibrium 
of countless multitudes of internal molecular motions, that 
are ever active, changing every moment, combining and 
separating, neutralising and reinforcing, as complex and 
incalculable as the multitudinous ripples of ocean. The im- 
mediate relations of organism and environment may perhaps 
be the least part of our difficulties, when we have made any- 
thing of it in the way of exact knowledge; we shall have to 
inquire into the complex and intimate correlations of its 
several parts and functions, whereby variations of one part 
entail important and far-reaching variations in other parts, 
without any direct action of the environment. Moreover, 

spun into many vain and vapid theories by speculative disciples, who, not 
applying themselves to patient intercourse with facts, use a few ill-observed 
and inadequately apprehended facts as the occasions of speculative applica- 
tions of the doctrine ; whereby it naturally does not fail to happen that 
everything in the world is capable of being explained by it. 



144 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

in this complicated business it is plain that the adaptation 
of an organism to its present environment may be not a 
useful adaptation of the organism as a whole, but the par- 
ticular adaptation of a variation of it, the development 
whereof may entail correlated inter- adjusting changes in it 
that are not progressions but retrogressions ; not really 
helpful to the whole, but positively hurtful to it as a whole, 
and so calculated to arrest its higher development or to 
promote its actual degeneration. 

In this relation, we shall do well to reflect on the 
different organic stages through which, in its course of 
embryonic development, the ovum of one of the higher 
animals passes from a seemingly homogeneous and scarcely 
visible substance to the complex structure of its mature 
form, the environment all the while being the same. Its 
successive variations do not owe much apparently in those 
circumstances to natural selection, rather would they appear 
to make their own election. No doubt development in this 
case repeats the different stages of descent when the en- 
vironment was different, and the successive stages thereof 
are so many evolutions of very complex involutions that 
have been accomplished in the successions of the ages ; but 
that does not alter the fact that the very remarkable evolu- 
tion of the microscopic germ is not due to its environment, 
but to occult qualities in itself, to its intrinsic essence. In 
its nature is inscribed the architectural plan or form of its 
development. 

The lesson which the example teaches is that always the 
initial variation of an organism, which we call accidental 
because its causes are unknown, and the form of develop- 
ment of the variation, are in the main the direct inspira- 
tion of the organism and essentially independent of its 
present environment. Without doubt the fitting external 
conditions are necessary to its survival and growth, but they 
i are not determinant of its origin. The material of the 
difference of mass between the acorn and the oak obviously 
comes from without — from the soil and from the atmosphere ; 
but it is the acorn that contains the determining conditions 
by which this matter has been transmuted into living struc- 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 145 

ture, as well as the directing form after which it has been 
constrained to fashion itself — not otherwise than as the form- 
following repair of a crystal takes place in a suitable solution 
— and by which always the tree is forbidden to grow up unto 
heaven. And we have to note this : that not only has the 
transmuting power been multiplied with the continual con- 
versions of non-living into living matter, but that each new 
element thus added is vital has been literally informed by 
the pre-existing /orm, and so transformed as to become a 
new store of form. In like manner, a variation occurring in 
each of two differently constituted organisms placed in the 
same surroundings, in which both were adapted to live, would 
not be of the same kind and take the same course of develop- 
ment in each case — would not, in fact, grow by minute incre- 
ments into the same kind of new organ. Each variation 
would be informed by the special antecedents in the organism 
from which it proceeded, being the expression of the corre- 
lation of its parts, and carrying in itself the formal plan 
of its future development : would nowise be moulded help- 
lessly by circumstances, but would mould circumstances 
helpfully. Natural selection gives account only of the 
quantitative increase, it gives no account whatever of the 
qualitative nature of the new variation. 

Thus much then by way of showing that in virtue of the 
autonomy of an organism there is what we may call an 
organic spontaneity manifesting itself in variations that 
are certainly not due to the surroundings, but which must, 
in order to survive, meet with fit surroundings. The bad 
side of this tendency to variation is exemplified by the 
appearance of morbid growths and other diseased products 
in the organism, which, if the medium be fit, increase, but, 
if unfit, dwindle and die ; and the important co-operation 
of the medium is well shown further by the way in which 
infectious germs are noxious or innocuous, according to its 
states, and more especially by the way in which some such 
germs may be cultivated artificially into virulence or into 
innocence outside the body, according to the media in which 
they are placed. 

Nor is it to be overlooked in this connection that a like 



146 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

process of variation is manifest in mental operations, and is 
at the foundation of the development of new ideas. Given 
the basis of good mental nutrition and respiration in a 
suitable social atmosphere, and there take place from time 
to time spontaneous variations testifying to the autonomy 
of the organism. It is mental productivity as distinguished 
from reproductivity ; and it naturally diminishes as age 
advances, until it is entirely lost in old persons, because 
with the increasing failure of their vital powers there is no 
superfluous nutrition and no exuberant energy to make a 
variation. The most striking instance of productivity in 
the organic sphere and in its intimately related mental 
sphere is seen in the nature and operation of the repro- 
ductive impulse, which in the individual is truly a sort of 
organic spontaneity ; not certainly provoked by the sensual 
pleasure that accompanies its gratification, for plants practise 
sexual congress without having any sensation, and animals 
and human beings accomplish it before they know the 
pleasure it brings. Meanwhile the gratification that attends 
its function is a signal justification of its strong and blind 
impulse ; a proof also, since no two beings are exactly alike, 
how deep in the heart of nature lies not only the propa- 
gation of life but also the production of variations in its 
propagation. 

The tendency to variation in organic beings is most 
manifest in man, who for the present marks the organic 
culmination of nature, and most manifest in his highest 
developments — that is, in the functions of his intellect and 
imagination ; though it may be a question whether in his 
physical characters the tendency be not rather to greater 
uniformity, as the conditions of life on earth are becoming 
more alike. Through the great changes which he has made 
on its surface in order to adapt it to his wants, and through 
the dominating and unquestioned ascendency which he has 
long conquered for himself, all other branches of the animal 
kingdom have had their development checked and the forms 
thereof stereotyped in a sterile immobility. The energies of 
organic becoming have been collected and absorbed into the 
channel of human becoming. Any intellectual or moral 



INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 147 

progress on the part of animals, or any advance on their 
remarkable instincts — which in the ingenious adaptations of 
means to end stand so strangely apart from the poor and 
unprogressive character of their present intelligence, like 
stereotyped survivals of a period of development when they 
possessed higher adaptive powers than they do now — is 
rendered impossible. Only in those animals that are used 
by man to subserve his wants, and cultivated by him for 
the purpose, is there any notable tendency to survival and 
variation. There is no animal not domestic but flies 
instantly from his presence : ages of pursuit and persecution 
have made that the urgent self-conservative instinct of 
every creature that shares the earth with him. The wild 
animals, like wild men, are indeed fast coming to find 
themselves without a medium in which they can survive, 
since it is impossible for them to accommodate themselves 
to the medium that man is making of the earth, almost all 
parts of which he now either cultivates for his use or 
traverses for his needs or pleasure. They survive as antique 
monuments of past climates, past soils, past conditions of 
the earth at past geological epochs, of which in their day 
and generation they were doubtless the best outcome ; nay, 
perhaps, each the best and most beautiful product, if con- 
sidered in relation to its proper medium, howbeit that in a 
foreign medium and age some of them appear huge mon- 
strosities and anachronisms. That they have thus lived on 
into an epoch of the world which has long outgrown them, 
and has no appreciation of their beauty and fitness, having a 
quite special human standard of its own, is their misfortune. 
Happily for them they are not disquieted with aspirations 
for ideals beyond them ; each kind holds to its own standard ; 
and the rhinoceros wisely prefers his ugly and unwieldy 
consort to the beauty and the proportions of the Venus de 
Medici. 

It is not only that the dominating ascendency of man 
prevents progress in the animals below him that are not 
moulded by him for his uses, but it tends to produce retro- 
gression in them. If one of two animals of the same kind 
or of nearly allied kinds undergoes a variation that is useful 



148 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

to it in the struggle for existence, and prospers by reason of 
it, the advantage it has gained does not count to the other 
simply as the deprivation of an advantage, but it is a 
positive disadvantage to it ; inasmuch as, having a rival that 
takes and occupies the higher place, it is now driven to live 
a lower life, to lose its organic aspirations, and by degrees to 
undergo degradation. The conditions of its existence, 
instead of being open and propitious to development on its 
part, are now made unpropitious and positively antagonistic 
by the repressive presence of its successful competitor. Let 
us suppose, by way of illustration, the instances of man and 
his monkey-like next-of-kin, at the time when, descended 
from a common stem, their ways began to diverge. It is 
evident that when the legs came to be used exclusively for 
locomotion instead of the four limbs, and thereby the hands 
were left free for grasping purposes, for contrivance, for 
defence, for gestures of expression, and for other special 
uses, there would not only be the positive gain of hands to 
those who had taken this path of progress ; but those who 
had not done so, but still continued to employ their hands 
in climbing, would become more and more dependent upon 
that use of them, in order to escape the competing hostility 
of the superior animal now in possession of the best places, 
and so to survive. Thus the locomotive uses of the arms 
would be perpetuated and even augmented, and the higher 
uses of them put a still greater distance away ; and thus 
likewise in other respects each more in the special progress 
of man would be a more in the special path of the monkey's 
diverging progress. The same law reigns in the struggle 
for existence among the races of men, leading to the de- 
generation and extinction of the inferior races, and will 
continue to do so till it come to pass, if it ever shall come 
to pass, that the struggle for existence is checked and con- 
trolled by the growth and spread of the sentiment of uni- 
versal brotherhood, and so the struggle become one not of 
individual against individual, nor of race against race, but 
one of the whole human race, compact in solidarity of feeling 
and aim, against the obstacles that hinder its progress 
towards higher and higher ideals. 



SECTION IV. 

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 

In the social development of mankind we notice and mark 
the same sort of nisus of evolution manifest in the same 
kind of process of more and more complex becoming that has 
gone on in inorganic nature and in the development of 
organic life. It is indeed because of the necessity of 
carrying the conception into the higher region of social 
evolution, and of making use of it there, that I have lingered 
upon it at length and laboured to make its nature plain. 
To realise the full meaning of physiological facts, to get 
clear and exact notions of them in their mental relations, 
is a difficult business, and one which those who base 
psychology on the method of introspection seem to be unable 
to accomplish ; it is impossible for them so much as to grasp 
adequately the conception of a living organism, because of 
their want of physiological training. They persuade them- 
selves they get it from text-books, when they only get there 
much such a vague and inadequate conception as a blind 
man would get of colours from a description of them ; and 
in face of the fruitful facts and conceptions which present 
themselves, but which they cannot assimilate vitally, they 
go on repeating the empty phrases of their schools. Their 
real relation to physiology is this : they demoralise by their 
psychological spirit what they appropriate from it, and they 
fail to impregnate their psychology with its spirit. Tell 
tiiem that the social feeling operates in a civilised society 
to make a person feel the obligation to do right, and they 
protest against the statement as absurd, because they can 
think of such influence only as deliberative, reasoned, pro- 
spective, self -regarding ; they cannot conceive that it should 
be, as it often is, immediate, urgent, self-denying, instinctive. 
Were they to be at the pains to learn and grasp adequately 
the physiological conception of an organism and of the vital 
relations therein of the parts to the whole and of the whole 
to the parts, whereby, all being members of one body and 



150 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

members one of another, the whole works in each living 
element and each living element in the whole, they would 
experience no such difficulty ; for they would then compre- 
hend that an individual can no more help feeling the 
constant presence and influence of the social medium in 
which, for which, and by which he lives, and of responding 
to it, than an organic element can help feeling the presence 
and influence of the organism to which it belongs. 

Eeflecting on the admirable consensus of parts in the 
physiological organism, whereby so many and diverse 
elements work together in the bonds of peace and in unity 
of spirit for the good of the whole, may one not propound 
incidentally this hypothesis — namely, that each element 
contains in itself, in some secret and incomprehensible way, 
an abstract essence of the whole ? For if a minute substance 
like the sperm-cell or germ-cell contains in itself the essential 
characters of every organic element of the body from which 
it proceeds, as it plainly does ; and if nutrition is at bottom 
a continuous generation, as it virtually is ; why may not 
each specific element of the body contain in abstract, in its 
innermost nature, the essential characters of all the diverse 
elements that are organically united to form the whole ? So 
perhaps might we explain, among other things, the singular 
occurrence, in morbid cysts in the breasts and other parts of 
the body, of some of the embryonic structures that are 
ordinarily met with only as products of normal embryonic 
development in the womb. It is not in that case that a 
nascent germ- or sperm-cell travels to these distant regions 
and developes there, but that the elements of tissue in these 
regions have had awakened in them the dormant properties 
which they possess in common with the germ- and the sperm- 
cell. 

In the progress of social evolution new starts or varia- 
tions occur, just as organic starts occur, and they are in like 
manner the results of new combinations between the condi- 
tions immanent in the individual and the coincident apt 
conditions of the social medium — the intrinsic and the in- 
fluent conditions. Already have we seen how an individual 
developes a variation when he takes the tone of manner and 



MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 151 

feeling and thought of a particular sect of society in which 
he lives. Not with deliberate method but almost insensibly : 
he observes more or less consciously in order to act; by 
acting habitually after a certain fashion, he becomes ; and 
the result of such becoming is that he feels, thinks and is a3 
one of the sect. Thenceforth he is at home there, because 
he responds congenially to the impressions of the circle, and 
easily gives out in function what he has embodied in struc- 
ture — that is to say, displays naturally in feeling, thought 
and conduct that which he has made part of his character. 
But when a new thought is struck out for the first time in 
the course of human progress, obviously no such conscious or 
semi-conscious imitation is possible, since there is nothing 
to imitate; it is a new thing, an initial variation of the 
social organism, which cannot have been learnt anywhere. 
Whence comes it ? If one thing is shown plainly by obser- 
vation of the course of development of human thought, it is 
that a new thought is in the air, so to speak, before it is ap- 
prehended and expressed, and that the aptly constituted and 
happily placed individual becomes the organ of it ; he makes 
explicit that which was implicit in the instinctive pulses of 
thought and feelingaround him, which was waiting in tension, 
as it were, to burst into blossom, and which perhaps had 
already made some obscure and abortive attempts to do so. 
He is the first bud to blossom successfully on a branch 
where others, moved by a common pulse of life, are ready to 
blossom also. Hence it comes to pass that a new thought 
is seldom, if ever, evolved without more persons than one 
having had dim intimations or more or less distinct concep- 
tions of it, and that endless wranglings concerning the 
honour of priority take place among those who, ignoring 
their intellectual parentage and social inspiration, flatter 
themselves they have any special merit in the matter. 

Good proof of the essential dependence upon the medium, 
as well for its survival as for its origin, is afforded by the fate 
which befalls a new idea that is put forth before its time — that 
is to say, before the social medium is fitted to entertain it ; 
when perhaps the very language in which it may express 
itself is wanting, and a fit language for it has yet to be framed 



152 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

and learnt ; for it produces no effect, comes into the world 
almost stillborn, is neglected and soon forgotten, and has 
to be rethought and proclaimed afresh years or generations 
afterwards. Meanwhile the neglected author of the prema- 
ture birth pays the penalty of being in advance of his age 
by being thought a speculative visionary while he lives, and 
afterwards, when his idea has gained acceptance on the 
authority of some foster-parent, by being acknowledged to 
have made a lucky guess, for which it would be absurd to 
award him any credit; all the real merit of the discovery 
being assigned to him who proclaimed it at a time when it met 
with acceptance, or who so enforced attention to it by elabo- 
rate demonstration and by much insistance that all persons 
with any pretence to knowledge were forced to take sides 
either for or against it. Seldom, if ever, has there been a 
discovery made that has not been thus anticipated; in 
fact it would be no exaggeration to say that a new thought 
cannot be very original if it gets itself soon accepted ; and it 
is not to be doubted that as with organic variations, so with 
the organs of new ideas, many perish before the one survives 
to bear fruit. A well-worn saying respecting a scientific 
discovery is that it goes through three stages — the first 
stage, when it is ridiculed as absurd ; the second, when it is 
denounced as contrary to religion ; and the third, when it is 
declared to have nothing new in it. Perhaps a truer 
statement of the stages of its development would be — first, 
that in which it is announced in vague outline and despised 
as vain speculation ; the second, when it is proved and esta- 
blished by elaborate observation and reasoning; and the 
third, when it is appropriated by the speculative philosophers 
and prostituted to their theoretical uses. 

The wonder perhaps is that a new idea should ever be 
born before its due time — that the social organism should 
ever develope the initial organ before it has reached the 
fitting stage of evolution to maintain it. Somehow, in the 
continuous flux of events there has happened the favourable 
coincidence of external conditions and of a happily consti- 
tuted individual, the result of the concurrence being a new 
birth of thought ; while it is only after many years that the 



MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 153 

general level of knowledge has been so raised as to admit of 
the promulgation of the discovery and of its simultaneous 
verification. Time and chance happen in all things; where- 
fore the ancients rightly built altars and dedicated temples to 
Fortune. A great character in a mean sphere shall never 
be heard of beyond his village, though he may be a notable 
figure there, while the qualities of a poorer character on a 
large stage shall cause his name to echo through human 
history. The jealousies of Augustus Caesar and Mark 
Antony were war throughout the then known world : the 
jealousies of two men of equal natural capacities to those of 
Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony may be a quarrel in a 
country alehouse. The finest tree of the forest is the pro- 
duct of a good seed falling on good ground in propitious sur- 
roundings, but where are the thousand seeds that perished 
the very year when it germinated, every one of which would 
have produced as fine a tree as it, had the same good fortune 
befallen them ? Has not many an inglorious potential 
Newton gazed at the stars and only thought of them, if 
he has thought of them at all, as a means of lighting him 
home at night? Those who see not a miraculous but a 
natural event in the birth and progress of Christianity will 
acknowledge that, had its founder been born two hundred 
years before he was born, at a time when his countrymen 
were not waiting in earnest expectation of the coming of a 
redeemer of Israel, and before the commencing dissolution 
of the Eoman Empire yielded a soil excellently fit for its 
growth, he would have lived and died in a mean obscurity. 
Had there been no French revolution, and had Napoleon not 
chanced to come in the slackening stream of it, he might 
well have ended his days obscurely, a moody and discon- 
tented captain of artillery, as men of equal capacity to his 
have very likely often done. For my part, I have certainly 
known in country villages men of more native power of 
intellect, of larger humour, of more quietly heroic self-sup- 
pression, of more silent grandeur of character, of more solid 
human qualities, than any distinguished man that I have 
ever met with ; he, for the most part, is actually a signally 

self-conscious and attenuated person, the potential gold of 
11 



154 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

him beaten out to the finest possible display, and much de- 
moralised, whether as politician, preacher, literary or scien- 
tific man, by his constant appeals to public approbation. 

Let it be supposed that by some singular chance an indi- 
vidual of an extraordinary genius is born among a tribe of low 
savages, it is pretty certain that he would not be a great 
engineer, nor a great mathematician, nor a great moralist ; 
the antecedent elements or conditions of such a product of 
civilisation being entirely wanting in the low social organi- 
sation, it could not be a product of it ; and he would apply 
his superior powers in order to excel in those arts of oratory 
in council, or in that skill and valour in battle, in which it 
was the tribal ambition and the tribal glory to excel. Nor 
would the moral approbation of conscience, individual and 
tribal, fail to be measured by the number of scalps that he 
brought home. Were a low savage transplanted to a civil- 
ised country, it is no less certain that he would fail to take 
root there ; though he might be well constituted after his 
kind, he would hardly have more power of successful adjust- 
ment to the complex conditions of his surroundings than a 
natural imbecile would have; the product of a lower and 
much simpler social organisation, he has neither acquired for 
himself nor inherited from his ancestors the organic involu- 
tion of the more complex social conditions which would 
render him capable of feeling them and of adapting himself 
to them. He would be sadly out of place — without habits, and 
without the sensibilities and faculties to acquire them. The 
Sermon on the Mount would not sensibly affect a native 
Andaman islander, nor would Kant's categorical moral im- 
perative, in spite of its a priori character and innate sanction, 
have much authority in the conscience of an Iroquois Indian. 
We may, if we choose, suppose the opposite case of a civil- 
ised youth transplanted into the midst of a tribe of low 
savages and compelled to end his days among them, without 
ever having intercourse with any beings higher than they : 
how long would he preserve his civilised feelings and habits, 
with nothing in his surroundings to elicit their exercise, to 
foster their growth, to maintain their vitality ? He would 
dwindle and die morally and intellectually, as a gardener's 



MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 155 

slip will die when it is not planted in a suitable soil or 
grafted in a suitable structure, though, like the slip, he 
would grow on his native stem or if planted in a fitting 
medium. 

One hardly realises for the most part to what singular 
fashions of thought and feeling human character may be 
bent by the training of special circumstances and habits : 
not only how custom dominates in belief and practice, but 
how it operates in a quasi-mechanical way to determine even 
modes of sensibility. The horror felt by a savage at the 
spectacle of a human sacrifice is less than that which would 
be felt by a civilised person who was not a butcher at the 
spectacle of the slaughter of an ox ; and I dare say that the 
children of the village would dance with pleasure and imitate 
the victim's cries, as in an English village they imitate with 
delight the squeals of a pig that is being killed. Would it 
have been believed possible, if history had not authenticated 
the fact, that there ever were nations which deemed it a 
mark of piety and affection to kill and eat their aged fathers ? 
See how the ignorant savage, taken prisoner by his enemy, 
endures the menaces and tortures to which he is subjected, 
without uttering a single sigh or cry for mercy, or making 
the least sign of submission; with what an invincible 
courage he braves his tormentors, railing at them and defy- 
ing them to do their worst, reproaching them with their 
impotence to extract one cry of pain, exulting and insulting 
over them in boasts of the greater tortures which he has 
made their people suffer. All this because the custom of 
tribal belief, deeming it the glory of a death by torture to 
triumph in such stoical endurance, has trained his nature 
into such a development as, when stimulated to an ecstatic 
transport, to vanquish its natural sensibilities. 

It is difficult to repel an intruding suspicion or distrust of 
the stability of anything based in human progress, when one 
considers the grossly inconsistent belief and the signal moral 
insensibilities in particular relations that exist, sometimes 
without the least reprobation, and even without a perception 
of their inconsistent character, in communities and individuals 
that have reached a high state of general intelligence and 



156 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

moral feeling. So impossible is it to say of any qualities, 
however incompatible, that they may not coexist in the same 
individual, that one might suppose a being compounded of 
entirely opposite qualities and believe he would somehow 
contrive to reconcile them. Certainly we shall find a man 
sometimes to be one person in one set of circumstances, and 
quite another person, displaying different habits of thought, 
feeling and conduct, in another set of circumstances; it 
is with him as it is with a boy when he is at school, and 
when he is home for the holidays, who, without knowing it, 
falls under different habits of thought and feeling instantly 
the change is made, and in one state can hardly realise 
himself thinking and feeling as he does in the other. Reflect 
on the gross examples among all nations of superstitious 
credulity contradicting the earliest and most constant teach- 
ings of daily experience and the plainest dictates of morality ; 
on the most devilish tortures that human ingenuity could 
devise inflicted by devout Christians on their fellow-believers 
of a minutely different sbade of faith; on the inculcation of 
duelling as a high code of honour in the same breath with a 
devout assent to the commandment, ' Thou shalt not kill ; ' on 
slaveholding and its attendant horrors sanctioned complacently 
by pious men and kind-hearted fathers of families, with- 
out the least suspicion of any wrong on their part ; on wars 
and oppressions undertaken by Christian rulers and blessed 
by the ministers of a gospel of peace and brotherly love ; 
on the prayers and thanksgivings to Almighty God offered 
up by these same ministers in gratitude for triumphant 
slaughter; on hell and its everlasting torments proclaimed 
the eternal portion of all but a select minority of the human 
race, and by them contemplated with pious equanimity, if 
not actually as a reflex augmentation, by contrast, of their 
unspeakable felicity. 1 Every one is penetrated and intoned, 

1 Take a recent example furnished by one of the best known popular 
preachers of the day, and a leading light among the Nonconformists. In a 
letter to the hon. sec. of a branch of the Antivivisection Society, he says : 
* I loathe the subject intensely, and I am unable to imagine the process 
by which men of education, or men at all, bring themselves to perform such 
cruelties.' In a sermon on the ' Eesurrection of the Dead,' an approval of 
the torture breeds another kind of eloquence. ' When thou diest thy soul 



MENTAX EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 157 

so to speak, by the social atmosphere of the particular 
medium in which he lives, and in the end so assimilates it, 
makes it so essential a part of himself, that he is insensible 
to moral relations that are not embedded in it, and feels 
no repugnance to immoral procedures which it sanctions. 
Fortunate indeed is it that there is a gradual development 
of the social organism independent of the foresight and the 
conscious efforts of individuals, a stream of tendency out- 
side their premeditations and predeterminations; that 
nourished by a silent process of evolution the travailing 
organism displays the deep impulse of its being by putting 
forth of its own motion, at the proper stage of its growth, 
the initial germ of the fitting organ to carry it to a higher 
stage of evolution. ' Know thyself/ says the moralist : to 
do that, says philosophy, is to know humanity, past and 
present, working in, for, and by thee. 

That the social medium has been created for man by 
humanity, as the blood is formed by the tissues for the 
organism, is a fact which we cannot keep too clearly in mind 
when we are considering its character and influence. As 
soon as he enters it, he finds himself surrounded with the 
fruits of the long travail of humanity in the most easily 
assimilable forms : a language that embodies its social evolu- 
tion ; all the various appliances of the arts and sciences that 
have been tediously acquired in the succession of ages; 
commerce and its complicated monetary means for the inter- 
change of commodities; the surface of the earth as it has 
been laboriously adapted to his uses by countless generations 
of mankind ; human beings of his own kind, each of whom 
has implicit in his nature the experiences of the race from 
its beginning, and so appeals, as well by the silent eloquence 
of look and gesture as by the articulate word, to the like 
implicit contents of his nature. With man there is a con- 
will be tormented alone, that will be a hell for it ; but at the Day of Judg- 
ment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells — thy soul 
sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire, exactly 
like that which we have on earth, thy body will lie, asbestos- like, for ever un- 
consumed — all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a 
string on which the devil shall for ever play his diabolical tunc of hell's 
unutterable lament.' 



158 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

tinuity, with animals a succession only, through the ages ; 
and so while the human infant inherits the gains of the 
race's experience, the rhinoceros has profited little or nothing 
by the experiences of its race for the last three thousand 
years. In order to have a scientific conception of the origin 
and development of human society, however, we ought to 
observe the simplest social facts as they present themselves 
in nature, and to reflect upon them in their objective aspects, 
not as they present themselves in the light of the subjective 
experience of a high social development; being well on 
guard not to bias observation, or to prejudge them in any 
way, by the assumption of a supernatural inspiration or 
other mysterious initial principle. Now the facts are that 
social union exists in creatures far below man in the scale of 
animal life — notably, for example, in the bees and in the 
ants. The ants have their slaves, their workers, their 
warriors, their milch-cows, or rather milch-lice ; their store- 
houses of winter grain, and, as some observers imagine, their 
places of burial and their planted fields ; their disciplined 
industry, their methodical wars, their admirable inter-com- 
munications and co-operations in difficulties and dangers. 
Indeed, we might well ask, as Celsus asked long ago, 'if any 
one looked down from heaven upon earth, what difference 
would he perceive between the works of men and those of 
bees 7 ? ' This he would perceive, that neither politician, nor 
philosopher, nor human labourer of any sort, be he the busiest 
imaginable, pursues his work with the persevering industry 
and intense singleness of purpose displayed by one of these 
little creatures ; which, moreover, does not make any claim on 
the admiration of its kind while it is doing its work, nor look 
for any memorial of itself after its life-work is done. In 
this connection let this pregnant reflection not escape notice 
— that the architectural works of the ant and the bee, like 
the wonderful webs of the spider, are constructive or creative 
works, no less so than a lace woven or than a palace built 
by human hands ; they are as truly works of art as a poem 
or a picture ; and if they had been done by man, we should 
consider them the products of a creative imagination, and 
admire them as excellent works of that noblest faculty. 



MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 159 

But in the ant they are not works of imagination in the 
human sense of the term ; they are the work of organic 
matter of a certain complexity of nature in a certain 
structural form; and what they prove is that an organic 
body by itself, without help of mind, is capable, in its 
degree, of doing that for which we think it necessary in 
human doings to invoke the conscious function of mind. In 
like manner, the conclusion we ought to draw from the 
social life of ants and bees is not that human society, con- 
sciously pre-ordained or divinely inspired, is the natural 
thinor and that these communities of ants and bees are an 
extraordinary and unaccountable freak of nature or caprice 
of Deity, but simply that there has been a natural tendency 
to the formation of social aggregations by organic beings of 
a certain complexity under certain conditions of existence ; 
that the disposition to co-operation in social union is an ulti- 
mate and essential fact of organic development of certain 
kinds — just as much so as any complex chemical combination 
or the formation of a complex organic molecule. If that be 
so, the right course is to apprehend the fact distinctly, and 
to use it in our examination of the beginnings of human 
society, not to apply to the social phenomena of ants and 
bees conceptions derived from the workings of man's in- 
telligence in the events of his social state. 

As a matter of fact, human beings do habitually construct 
imaginatively, without consciously pre-ordaining what they 
will construct, for imagination works independently of con- 
sciousness and will, its results only being so illumined ; 
indeed, there is not a faculty of mind which, though they 
began by using it consciously, they do not, after habitual 
practice, exercise unconsciously. By continual repetitions 
a sensation becomes less conscious, till, having become part 
of our habitual relations, it is hardly sensation at all : we do 
not, for example, ordinarily feel the presence of an artificial 
tooth which we have long had, nor the friction of the clothes 
which we daily wear. But the impression which has lost its 
distinctly conscious character as a sensation has then become 
a want or need, so that the absence of it is felt as the dis- 
comfort of something wanting ; it has been so incorporate 



160 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

in our nature that its removal leaves a sort of rent or 
wound in our mental being. In like manner, custom dulls 
perceptive consciousness, till perception becomes almost or 
quite automatic; we practise it habitually in regard to 
familiar objects, without consciousness of what we are 
doing, and experience the greatest difficulty in the world to 
go outside the path of habit ; wherefore it is that, bound to 
the tracks of habit, we fail to perceive new facts that lie 
close at hand, and miss for years the most obvious discoveries 
which they suggest. In these habitual perceptions men are 
scarcely less automatic than are ants and bees in their per- 
ceptions and acts. Desire again, intense as it is in the first 
instance, becomes automatic by habitual repetition ; whence 
it notably happens that the end desired is lost sight of in 
the means adopted to attain it, that which was means coming 
to be desired as end ; and afterwards, when prolonged repe- 
tition has made this pursuit the habit of a life, even the 
consciousness of the secondary end disappears, being trans- 
formed into the need or necessity of an habitual activity. 
Thus we see man brought, in all the relations of his 
habitual mental activrty, to automatic states very like those 
of the ants and bees, and find it, if we attempt the task, 
almost as difficult a business to move him out of them as it 
is for these creatures to go outside the range of their 
machine-like doings : the moral of the whole matter being 
that most men eventually are little more than machines, 
whose sayings and doings from day to day may be predicted 
with as much certainty as the cries and doings of a parrot. 
Organisation proves itself capable of doing in them that 
which it does by itself in the ant or bee. 

Perhaps it will be asked how it is, if organisation by 
itself can do these wonderful things, and if there is a natural 
tendency in certain kinds of organic beings to form social 
aggregations, that many more societies like those of bees 
and ants have not been formed. The answer is that it was 
impossible they should be formed, or, if formed, should 
survive, when all the social tendencies of organic matter 
had been concentrated in man. Once he had formed society, 
he checked by his dominating ascendency that social evolu- 



MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 161 

tion in other directions which, but for his appearance on 
earth, might have gone on to results we cannot imagine, 
and for aught we know may be going on now in some other 
planet. In all directions the lower animals found themselves 
checked and pursued, their societies disintegrated, and them- 
selves destroyed by the higher animal who, strong in social 
union, modified the whole surface of the earth to his uses, 
and sacrificed to his services, to his clothing, to his orna- 
ments, to his appetites, to his destructive propensities, every 
kind of creature over which he had been given dominion. 
Had one or two of the larger species of animals, such as the 
lion and the elephant, formed societies, like bees, it might 
have gone hard with man's dominion and even his existence 
on earth. Why they did not, and why bluebottles have not 
formed societies, like bees, are questions that ambitious 
sociologists might perhaps usefully apply themselves to 
answer. 

Meanwhile, we may suppose that the societies of ants 
have survived as lessons of what might have taken place 
in other animals under more favourable auspices, and that 
their social union became an actuality of organic deve- 
lopment, instead of being arrested as a possibility only, by 
reason of their burrowing habits in the construction of their 
habitations, of the smallness of their ingeniously constructed 
bodies, of their tenacious industry, of their prolific natures, 
of their numbers, and of the strength of their social union. 
And if we take leave to indulge still more fanciful notions, 
we may suppose again that the superiority of ants over bees 
in social evolution is owing to the fact that, being for the 
most part without wings, and so constrained to a closer and 
more sternly earnest converse with their more limited and 
less varied surroundings, they acquired a serious, patient, 
persevering, and diligent character, rather than a light and 
volatile disposition ; not otherwise than as the inhabitants 
of northern and temperate climes, forced to gain their means 
of subsistence and comfort by stern struggles with nature, 
and so to develope understanding by intending their minds 
to its laws, have been made more earnest, industrious, 
practical, and inventive than the inhabitants of tropical 



162 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

regions, where the luxuriance of nature favours indolence 
and frivolity. The advantage of wings has not been an 
intellectual advantage to the beings that possess them. 

Whatever its cause, the existence of a strong social sense 
in ants cannot well be disputed. Moreover, they have 
attained to a pretty complex society without, so far as we 
know, the events that have been necessary to bring human 
beings to their social state — without a fall from happiness 
because of eating a forbidden grain, without the necessity of 
an atonement, without supernatural intervention of any sort. 
Have they perhaps some vague religious sentiment? At 
the first blush it is a question that appears grossly absurd ; 
and yet it is not inconceivable that creatures which possess 
such a good foundation of moral sense as they manifestly do, 
have some dim glimmering or quivering in them of that 
which passes in human beings as religious sentiment. A 
vague awe they may have of a vast and overwhelming en- 
vironment which, in the to them inapprehensible form of 
an elephant's foot or other such huge, unknown, irresistible 
body, can crush them into instant nothingness ; and perhaps 
it was a vague awe of that kind which, by a steady repression 
of the egoistic and by a fostering of the altruistic element, 
served to constrain them into social union. The minutely 
and marvellously organised matter of their little bodies 
might display a sort of religious instinct without a religions 
consciousness, as it displays productive imagination without 
imagining, and social feeling without consciousness of 
citizenship ; for the ant's State is not, any more than the 
human State, founded on explicit theory and held together 
by consciously elaborated principles. 



SECTION V. 

THE SOCIAL FUSION OP EGOISMS. 

It is certainly impossible to account for the social sense in 
man, in the sense of explaining why it is what it is : we 
might as well ask why sexual sensibility is what it is, or 
why any other special sense is special. The example of 
the ants shows us that we need not look for its origin in 
the deliberate operations of a pre-ordaining conscious in- 
telligence of man, or in any special divine interposition 
on his behalf. That man is a social being is a funda- 
mental, ultimate fact of observation ; we perceive it in the 
social tendency which he has shown, independently, in 
different parts of the earth in all ages ; a tendency which 
has forced him into simple social union in the first instance, 
and afterwards in succession into higher and more complex 
unions, against his strong resistance and in spite of his 
efforts to remain separate. It is the all-mightiness of the 
whole dominating the particular desires and wills of the 
part. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which 
he has been made social in spite of himself, by the re- 
pression of egoistic passions opposing themselves violently to 
the union of individuals, of tribal egoisms and antipathies 
opposing themselves to the consolidation of tribes into a 
nation, of national egoisms and antipathies opposing them- 
selves to the confederation of mankind. By blood and iron 
has the welding work been done, in obedience to a stronger 
impulse than human passions could counteract. 

So soon, however, as men had united to form a society, so 
soon would a social sense inevitably be generated ; its occur- 
rence in the circumstances of such co-operation is a simple 
and ultimate fact of nature. A society without social feeling 
would be a contradiction in essence. This reflection we may 
not inaptly make here : that just as simpler chemical com- 
pounds are combined into a more complex compound, losing 
by such combination their own special properties, nay rut her 
having these suppressed properties constrained to minister 



164 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

to its maintenance and transformed into the properties which 
it displays ; so the egoistic passions and desires of the indi- 
vidual are combined and fused and utilised in the social 
state to generate the common life and to minister to the 
common weal of the community, losing their specific qualities 
in the operations by which their social transformation is 
effected. Egoism comprises the sum of inclinations that 
aim at purely personal gratification, each of these inclina- 
tions having its particular gratification ; and the further we 
go back in civilisation the greater is the predominance 
which these egoistic impulses have. If we could conceive 
an individual isolated and entirely alone in the world he 
would be a perfect egoist. But when the egoisms of two 
individuals who must live together meet, then the necessity 
to bear and forbear is instantly made evident. 

Let us imagine various chemical bodies with their specific 
energies to be brought together and thereupon immensely 
compressed or constrained into a certain material mould or 
form ; it is obvious that unless the energies entirely paralyse 
one another — which, since energy is indestructible, cannot 
be — they must produce, in consequence of their interactions 
of affinity and repulsion, a resulting energy that is not in 
the least like any of them. So likewise is it with the social 
combinations of individual egoistic desires and energies. 
Their antagonisms entail modifications and neutralisations 
in the forms of tolerances, compromises, forbearances, do- 
as-you-would be-done-by obligations, and the like ; and the 
union of suspended antagonisms, in order to the defensive or 
offensive action of the two persons against other persons, 
generates agreement in aim and means, and sympathy of 
thought and feeling. If they are not to be mutually anni- 
hilatory, individual aggregates of egoistic energies must so 
combine — first into families, and then into tribes ; thereupon 
families or tribes are pressed or welded into larger unions 
by the antagonisms of similar complex aggregates in hostile 
face of them ; and so it comes socially to pass that atoms 
unite to become molecules, as it were, and these again to 
become more complex molecules, by the concentrating 
pressure of surrounding antagonisms forcing repulsions into 



THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 165 

affinities. So solves itself the problem how out of seemingly 
irreconcileable egoisms to make altruism. Abstract virtue 
is virtue without contents ; the contents of actual virtue are 
that which is not virtue ; the word signifies nothing except 
by implication of its opposite — vice. For that reason we 
rightly do not call God virtuous. Everywhere we see the 
difference of the properties of the whole from the properties 
of the organic factors : the social community is something 
more than a juxtaposition or aggregation of individuals ; 
the State quite another thing than an aggregation of local 
communities ; the national character or consciousness some- 
thing different from the aggregation of many assemblies of 
individuals in many towns. For the most part science can 
tell the nature and number of the elements that form a 
complex chemical molecule and the exact proportions in 
which they combine ; but it will plainly be a long, long time 
before it is able to define exactly the constituent factors of 
a social organisation, and to set forth their relations to one 
another in the product. 

Meanwhile it is obvious enough how in the social state 
the egoistic passions of men — their antagonistic rivalries, 
jealousies, emulations, ambitions, avarices, and the like, 
being constrained and utilised in spite of themselves to 
serve the common good — are really the conditions of social 
progress : how, for example, avarice operates usefully to 
incite commercial zeal and activity, self-interest to establish 
rights of property, ambition to stir men to political and 
other public work, envy to spur them to make themselves 
equal to the object of envy, vanity to inspire them so to 
please as to gain the approbation of their fellows ; so that 
in the result, as Yico remarked, i vices capable of destroying 
the human race produce public happiness.' It is not that 
private vices become public virtues, as Mandeville ingeniously 
maintained, but it is that the neutralisations, fusions and 
other complicated reactions of these personal forces, when 
brought together in the social crucible, are constrained to 
issue in results contributive to the welfare of the whole. 

To seek private good in the fullest gratification of his 
passions the individual must recognise social Lnterde- 



166 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

pendences and adapt his conduct to the conditions in which 
he is a social element. Self-love is not despicable, but 
laudable, since duties to self, if self-perfecting — as true 
duties to self are — must needs be duties to others. Just as 
he may gratify a particular passion that is strong in him to 
the injury of himself as a whole, in defiance of what a large 
and true self-love would prescribe, so as a social element he 
may gratify his egoistic impulses in an extreme way and to 
the hurt of society as a whole. But just as he cannot get 
the fullest gratification, counting duration as well as in- 
tensity, out of a particular passion except by subordinating 
it to the larger welfare of the whole, losing in the end if he 
over-indulges it ; so he cannot get the fullest and best grati- 
fication of all his egoistic impulses in a complex society, 
except through a restraining respect to the interests of 
society as a whole ; he gains not, but loses, in the end, if he 
gives way to inconsiderate excess. As member of a social 
body he cannot live except by living in it, by it and for it, 
any more than an organ of his own body can live separate 
from the whole. Indeed, it is an incontrovertible truth that 
if a man were deliberately to set himself by careful calcula- 
tion to obtain the greatest happiness possible for himself in 
this world — which he could do only by getting the utmost 
gratification, not of a particular appetite or passion, but of 
every passion, appetite, sentiment or emotion which he was 
capable of being affected by — the experiment would in- 
fallibly force him to a vital realisation of the truth that he 
and others in the social body are truly members of one body, 
in which no one can suffer or rejoice apart, and, as such, 
fellow-workers to an end which, though not pre-conceived 
by them, actually controls and directs their energies. He 
would feel vitally the solidarity of mankind, and perceive 
that in it he lives and has his being ; by it, witting or un- 
witting, is governed ; and from it derives obligations of duty. 
For it is not merely that his passions work in spite of him 
to a higher and wider end than he foresees, but, inde- 
pendently of reflection, he is himself insensibly permeated 
and inspired with the social spirit in which he is born and 
lives : the consequence of which is that his own nature 



THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 167 

undergoes a gradual social transformation with the advance 
of social development, and so the desire of what seems to 
him good becomes little by little less self-regarding and has 
more and more regard to the good of the community. As 
a socially constituted being, he does social acts naturally 
and, so to speak, instinctively, without considering exactly 
whether they will bring him pleasure or pain ; he feels his 
own weal in the common weal, and it is his pleasure to 
exercise the function of which he is capable ; in fact it may 
come to be his egoistic impulse to act altruistically, his 
selfish impulse to act unselfishly. How vain and empty 
then the vague discussions concerning the hedonistic or 
altruistic primum mobile of individual conduct ! 

It is very evident that the different appetites, passions, 
and affections of individuals in social combination tend 
really to promote both public and private good, though 
some of them have more immediate respect to private, 
others of them to public good. The sexual passion is as 
strong an instance as can be adduced of a purely egoistic 
passion, for its impulse is blind self-gratification — in its 
most brutal aspects, a veritable rape of pleasure ; but when 
we reflect on its wide-reaching results in the foundation of 
the family, which is the constituent element of society, we 
perceive how vast a social signification it has. It is not by 
eradication but by wise direction of egoistic passions, not 
by annihilation but by utilisation of them, that progress in 
social culture takes place ; and one can only wonder at the 
absurdly unpractical way in which theologians have de- 
claimed against them, contemning and condemning them, 
as though it were a good man's first duty to root them clean 
out of his nature, and as though it were their earnest aim to 
have a chastity of impotence, a morality of emasculation. 

What wonder that Christian morality has failed, and must 
fail, to govern the practical conduct of life in the struggle 
for existence, and that the individual perforce accommodates 
his morality to his life, instead of adjusting his life strictly 
to his morality ! Could there be a more unhappy spectacle 
than that of the poor wretch who should take its moral 
maxims in literal earnest and make them the strict rules of 



168 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

his life ? The plain effects of them are to make beggars and 
impostors by profusion of charity ; to invite affronts by easy 
forgiveness of injuries ; to render it the interest of no one 
either to befriend or to forbear injuring another, because of 
its rigid inculcation of the same loving attitude towards 
friend and enemy ; to put the innocence of the dove at the 
mercy of the guile of the serpent ; to make the good man 
the easy prey of the scoundrel ; to suffer crime to go un- 
punished because it must always be that there is no one 
who has the sinless right to punish ; to cultivate sorrow and 
self-abasement as the creed of life ; to take no thought for 
tomorrow, because the lilies of the field toil not ; in fine, to 
do all those things that would render a State impossible. 
An eminent Catholic writer has surmised that men would 
have falsified geometry as they have corrupted Christianity, 
had it been their interest to do so ; but the truth is that 
the corrupted Christianity is an example of the survival of 
the fittest, a proof of the necessity of the corruption ; and 
that Christianity could not have survived at all had it not 
been corrupted into practicality. The grand and lofty ideal 
which it presents goes far to leave human nature out of the 
reckoning ; and therefore human nature, when it ought to 
reduce it to practice, goes far to leave it out of the reckoning. 
And as in time past, so in time to come ; for it is not likely 
that men will ever be brought to a sheep-like uniformity of 
character, when they shall be gentle, peaceable, free from 
disturbing desires of progress, having all, wanting nothing, 
happy in a placid immobility of being. Such an extinction 
of originality in what would be evolutional closure will 
always be prevented by the feverish activity of the un- 
quenchable passions of human nature, for it is by them that 
nature pursues its aim, in spite of man's ideal desire of 
peace, concord, ease ; they are the ministers of its work, and 
through them he is made to fulfil its purpose. All the 
horrible and heartrending things that have ever been in the 
world — wars, slaughters, tyrannies, tortures ; frauds, guile, 
intrigues and lies ; lusts, rapes, revelries, debaucheries, 
thefts, murders and other crimes ; — all the offsprings, great 
and small, open or secret, immediate or remote, of human 



THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 169 

passions have been strictly necessary events in the becoming 
of what is — not to be deplored as accidents, but viewed in 
tranquil spirit as fulfilments, of progress - and will continue 
to be necessary events thereof, so long as the order of pro- 
gress continues to be human. Not, perhaps, always in the 
gross and violent manifestations of the past : wars, for 
example, may cease in their crude military forms of open 
violence, but they will still continue in subtler forms of 
commercial and industrial competitions ; and the passions 
which they breed in these circumstances may perhaps be 
more insidious and demoralising than those of open war, 
which, as an incomparable school of heroism, devotion, 
self-sacrifice, has actually been the mightiest instrument of 
human progress. 1 

Co-operation to a common end has been at the foundation 
of all society, and it is easy to perceive how it may have 
been a main basis of the formation of language, which is so 
essentially bound up with social development. For my part, 
I hold that the working of men together for a definite pur- 
pose has preceded their feeling together ; that synergy goes 
before sympathy ; and that the latter is developed as a con- 
sequence of the former. The order of the process in fact is 
— first, synergy, then sympathy, and afterwards synthesis — 
that is to say, in their order, action together, feeling together, 
and thinking together. The consensus of action becomes a 
sense-in-common or social sense, and the latter by a still 
higher evolution a conscience or moral sense, which is the 
affective outcome of knowing or thinking together, the feeling 
bred of a common intellectual synthesis. Always is it the effect 
of co-operative activity to engender a common feeling as the 

1 Open robbery by violence on the highway is pretty well extinct, and wo 
pride ourselves on our progress in consequence. But was that open robbery of 
the person really so immoral and so widely harmful as the more subtle and 
far-reaching robbery of those who start fraudulent commercial oompanies and 
ruin thousands ? And was the moral state of the community wane then, when 
the highwayman was hanged for his crime, than it is now when tin* successful 
company-monger who lives by robbery is not hanged, not even BOOnted as a 
scoundrel, but is received into society because of his riches, and beoomea per- 
haps a member of the legislature, where it would be thought very ill mai 
to make the least reference to his criminal career? 
12 



170 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

expression of it; and as intellectual activity represents 
complex reflex processes of activity at successively higher 
removes, the corresponding feelings are respectively also of a 
higher and more refined character ; whence it comes to pass 
that conscience or moral sense rises higher and higher, in its 
different degrees of refinement, by development out of social 
feeling. But to say so is not, as some persons hastily and 
indignantly imagine, to say that moral sense is no more 
than a primitive social sense : the parts of a flower are 
transformed leaves, but the flower is not a leaf, nor is it 
identified with a leaf by having its parts traced back to a 
primitive leaf. In like manner, to trace the roots of the 
moral sense down into social feeling, and even deeper still into 
the instinct of propagation, as one might do, is not an identi- 
fication of two things that are different, but an exposition of 
a particular case of continuity of development in nature. 

The recognition of an inflexible order of nature does 
not strip phenomena of their moral meaning, as many 
persons ignorantly fear; on the contrary, the growth of 
morality through the ages, which they are happy to believe 
takes place, is only possible, outside metaphysical regions, 
by virtue of such order. Is there any good reason why the 
doctrine of evolution and the doctrine of epiyenesis should be 
opposed to one another as irreconcileable doctrines ? More 
•correctly perhaps, epigenesis is an event of evolution, and 
evolution impossible without epigenesis ; for evolution, 
strictly speaking, is the unfolding of that which lies as a 
preformation in germ, "which a new product with new 
properties manifestly does not, any more than the differen- 
tial calculus lies in a primeval atom; while epigenesis 
signifies a state that is the basis of, and the causative impulse 
to, a new and more complex state. There is a leap ; and it 
is not good philosophy to blindfold ourselves with a big word 
when taking the leap, as some evolutionists will have us do, 
and then to protest that we have not taken it. At the same 
time it is equally bad philosophy, on the other side, to 
ignore the continuity between the new and old, and to find 
a reason for the present anywhere else than in the basis and 
impulse of the past. 






THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 171 

Given beings each of whom is moved individually by an 
instinct of self-preservation and its congenial passions, how 
to obtain a social and altruistic feeling ? The answer is, by 
the same process that we see in daily operation to increase 
it now in an individual — namely, by the social transforma- 
tion of egoistic impulses. Without carbon, hydrogen, 
oxygen, and nitrogen there could be no organic molecule ; 
without the animals that preceded him on earth in the line 
of ascent to him man could not have been, for he, as animal, 
sums up in himself the characters of the different species of 
animals below him and might therefore be described as the 
collective or general animal ; without the egoistic passions 
there could be no social sense. Perhaps it is because the 
moral sense has been developed out of the egoistic passions 
that it is capable of controlling them, for such control will 
be a development of energy at their expense by absorbing 
and transforming their energies. There is no loss of energy, 
no creation of energy, only a conversion thereof ; what con- 
science gains passion loses; and how could conscience 
restrain or otherwise affect passion, any more than it can 
restrain or otherwise affect gravitation, if it had no affinity 
of nature with it? An organic molecule could not maintain 
and increase itself by taking atoms of carbon and nitrogen 
into its structure, were not atoms of carbon and nitrogen 
natural constituents of its structure. The aim of moral 
development is to increase the higher quality which has 
been obtained by the social transformation of the lower 
qualities ; and that can be done only at the cost and by the 
consumption, as it were, of the lower qualities — by the social 
fusion of egoisms. In the strength of a man's egoistic 
passions lie the promise and the guarantee of the strength 
of his moral nature, if so be he succeeds in coercing them 
into entire furtherance of its best development. It is a 
huge absurdity then to place the egoistic and the altruistic 
feelings over against one another in absolute opposition and 
contrast, as if they were contradictory and entirely unrelated 
qualities, engaged in an eternal internecine conflict, and 
separated by the impassable barrier of a different order of 
existence; widely as they appear to contrast in their 



172 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

functions, altruistic feeling rests at bottom on the basis of an 
equilibrium of the passions. It may well be that the mode 
of evolution of moral feeling out of social feeling, and of social 
feeling out of egoistic feeling, are not easily discerned in the 
individual, whose consolidated heritages of aptitudes and facul- 
ties prevent us from tracing things back to their beginnings 
and so giving a genetic exposition of them, but an examination 
of the development of the race will leave no doubt of it. 

It is not within my purpose to meddle with the disputes 
concerning the nature and development of the moral sense, 
except so far as to point out how empty and unreal they are 
apt for the most part to be, owing to the common habit of 
abstracting it from all its contents. Instead of dilating on 
an inborn moral sentiment or intuition of right and wrong 
in the individual, would it not be wiser to observe accurately 
and to consider well moral instances as they are actually 
presented to us in nature ? What moral feeling, and of what 
kind, is there in children, in savages, and in an animal like the 
dog? And would children without education and without a 
suitable intellectual and moral medium develop it, any more 
than they would develop language under similar unpropitious 
conditions of existence ? In the nervous substrata that 
represent the results of ancestral action in moral relations 
they possess the proper instruments so to speak, which may 
be trained to action, but which will not act without fit 
training; the actual process of events being not inaptly 
comparable perhaps with that which takes place in the train- 
ing of the eye-muscles fur the exceeding fine and complex 
movements of educated vision. If that be so, the intuition 
of an abstract right and wrong before experience is as much 
an absurdity as the innate perception of a cathedral, or as 
the intuition of a complete European moral code. But 
immediately that the proper stimuli bring them into action 
there will be a certain pleasure from the moral exercise, as 
there is from the exercise of other functions; and that 
pleasure is naturally felt as moral sentiment. 

It is not in all children that these substrata exist in 
equal perfection of development : a savage child could no 
more learn high morality in favourable circumstances than 



THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 173 

it could learn high geometry; and amongst children of 
civilised persons there are great differences, some being 
born with manifestly better moral aptitudes than others, 
just as some are born with good geometrical aptitudes and 
others not. From the moment they are put into exercise 
in a civilised child they are subject to continual training, 
conscious or unconscious, through imitation and education ; 
for always around it and pressing on it are those strong 
social forces which are connoted by such names as sym- 
pathy, most powerful and far-reaching in its most signal 
example of love; imitation which, resting on a basis of 
sympathy, is a function of the nervous system that we see 
in continual operation, conscious and unconscious ; custom, 
the power of which to determine modes of thinking and 
feeling, as well as doing, it is impossible to exaggerate; 
and opinion, operating not only well in inspiring individuals 
with the desire to obtain the good opinion of those who are 
rightly respected and esteemed by them, but oftentimes ill 
in inculcating bad habits of thought and feeling, and giving 
an authoritative sanction to false and pernicious beliefs. 
These forces act so steadily and continually through gene- 
rations that they might well end by making all men alike, 
as uniform in look and dispositions as a flock of sheep, were 
it not that the ever active passions of human nature — envies, 
emulations, ambitions, and the like — prevent such a peaceful 
consummation. Necessarily, however, the effects of special 
social media are to fashion special types of social or moral 
feeling, according to the particular types that prevail in them 
respectively ; wherefore a history of morals is the story of a 
great many types that have been among different peoples and 
at different epochs, and eternal principles have not had a longer 
eternity than the space of an epoch or the life of a nation. 

What we have to learn from these considerations is, once 
more, that there is no such reality as an abstract moral feel- 
ing or conscience ; that conscience is not being but notion ; 
that there are as many particular moral feelings as there are 
particular cases ; a great variety of them, differing in quality 
in different persons and in different peoples according to 
their intellectual and social developments and to the moral 



174 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

ideals which they cherish and preach. Morality therefore 
may contain a very weak or a very strong tincture of moral 
essence ; and it is with the particular feeling not with the 
abstraction that discussion must concern itself in order to be 
fruitful. To this end it should not be lost sight of for a 
moment that morality is practical — its basis conformity to an 
end outside self, the end of the whole as distinguished from 
a purely personal end ; and in that particular aspect what we 
have to investigate and consider are the special and complex 
functions of the adapted nervous substrata in response to the 
special and complex social impressions. A grand ethical 
principle is a blaze of light in the sky far overhead, but it 
does not lighten the particular path along which we have to 
painfully pick our way; for it is the application of the prin- 
ciple to the special case that is the trouble. Not to think 
and feel only, but to do, is. the end of being — to act one's 
part in the becoming of things and to affect for good or ill the 
common weal by such action; were pure Contemplation the 
business of life, were it enough to think and feel about things, 
the logical end of it would be a self-annihilating ecstasy. 

Here, then, with the highest moral feeling, as was the 
case with abstract thought, we are brought to a living 
contact with realities ; home we come in the end to the pri- 
mitive basis of a concrete reflex act, if we are resolved to un- 
derstand its exact meaning or contents. To dispute about 
pains and pleasures in the general, egoism and altruism in 
the abstract, as motives of action, is to begin anywhere and 
end anywhere, but to arrive nowhere. Pure internal feelings 
of pleasure and pain, of moral approbation and disapproba- 
tion, undoubtedly exist, but in the order of existence they are 
rooted in action and developed out of experience, and must 
in the last resort receive their interpretation there. In the 
first instance, external considerations of good or ill determine 
suitable and useful acts, and perhaps the very same kind of 
acts that the highest moral feeling would determine ; at a 
later and higher stage of development, the feeling which has 
been developed out of action exists independently of the ex- 
ternal considerations that were effective in the first instance; 
and then the feeling by itself, which is purely internal, deter- 



THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 175 

mines action, its pains and pleasures therein being actually 
greater than those which sprang from purely intellectual con- 
siderations of self-interest. But if we would test the value of 
the feeling we must always look to the social quality of the 
action ; for there is not a vice nor crime of which human 
nature is capable that has not received the strongest appro- 
bation of conscience in one nation or another, at one period 
or another of human history. 



SECTION YI. 

THE COERCING FORCES OF SOCIAL UNION. 

To coerce the egoistic impulses into the combination or 
fusion necessary to produce the most primitive social feeling, 
it is plain that tremendous pressure from without must have 
been exerted upon the individual through the medium ; for 
only by such compression of their energies could the 
conditions of transformation, the white heat of fusion, so to 
speak, be generated. We may compare the operation to 
that by which the formless and sooty matter of carbon has 
been converted into the pure and sparkling crystal of the 
diamond. At a very early period of his martyrdom on earth, 
the conflict with the powers of nature and the animals 
around him must have forced man into some sort of co-opera- 
tion in order to survive — to conquer by obedience and to 
increase by conquest ; and it is plain that those individuals 
who did unite, and more especially those who united into 
the more compact organisation, having therein great ad- 
vantages in the struggle for existence over those who did 
not, would survive b}- natural selection. 

Mark well now the tremendous agencies that were invented 
in the shape of supernatural powers, social rites, sacred 
customs, superstitious ordinances, and the like — oftentimes 
horribly cruel and oppressive — and used in the most unsparing 
way in order to enforce conformity. The heavens above and 
the earth beneath and the regions under the earth were 



176 WILL IK ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

peopled with terrors of the most awful kind, with the aim 
and effect of compelling obedience and establishing a com- 
pulsory co-operation: such the terrible syntheses made in 
order to enforce synergy. We observe a similar process in 
operation now in the social fears and pressures brought to 
bear upon classes of men for the purpose of making them act 
together — in trade-unionism, Irish land-leagueism, and the 
like. Is there any tyranny anywhere equal to that which a 
savage ruler exercises upon his subjects, with abject submis- 
sion on their part, in enforcing the sacred ' customs '■ of the 
tribe ? What would be the fate in Dahomey now, or in any 
similar barbarous country, of a reformer who should venture 
to call in question the bloody and barbarous c customs ' of the 
nation ? But indeed it is almost as hard to conceive the 
occurrence of that sceptical disposition of mind in such a 
social medium, as it is to conceive the occurrence of an ant or 
other insect that should suddenly go outside its instincts and 
adopt a useful modification of conduct which, though it 
misses it, seems so close at hand and palpably evident to our 
higher contemplative intelligence ; or to suppose a complex 
reflex act that subserves a particular function to modify its 
character suddenly in order to supersede its old by a new 
and better suited function ; or to imagine a narrow, intense, 
evangelical mind that had never by any chance gone outside 
the shibboleth of the particular creed and phraseology in 
which it was born and bred, to develope suddenly extreme 
cosmopolitarian notions of human salvation and damnation ; 
or to conceive ninety- nine persons out of a hundred getting 
out of their habitual routine of thought, feeling, and conduct 
into a new path of higher thought which runs close at hand. 
See how well the automatic and necessary nature of 
habitual lines of thought and reasoning is shown by the 
fact that calculation and reasoning can be done by 
machinery, and that calculating and logical machines 
actually approach nearer in function to human thought 
than any animal can, superior as the animal is in the 
possession of feeling and will. The custom of the tribe is a 
sufficient explanation to the savage of any ceremonial or 
observance, however oppressive, and he cannot conceive that 
any other reason for it should be necessary ; it is that which 



THE COERCING FORCES OF SOCIAL UNION. 177 

always lias been, and he cannot conceive it as not being. 
In like manner, the automatism of a particular mental 
function which he calls a belief is the sufficient justification 
of it, its sure guarantee, to the person who has never brought 
his mind into other relations of experience : he will undergo 
martyrdom for conscience's sake rather than suffer himself 
to be made conscious of possible error. To have another 
belief not consistent with it presented to him, though it be 
one for which another person would undergo martyrdom 
for his conscience's sake, occasions him much the same 
shock of horror and dismay as would the appearance for the 
first time in a tribe of savages of a stranger who did not 
conform to their customs; or as would the intrusion into a 
nest of ants of a strange ant which exhibited other instincts 
than theirs. In both cases we may be pretty sure that the 
offended community, so soon as they rallied from the shock 
of surprise, would make short work of the intruder and his 
novelties. 

For an individual to be cast out of his special society, to 
be excommunicated from his community, has always been 
regarded as a terrible punishment by those who inflicted 
it, and an awful fate by him whom it befell ; for a long time, 
indeed, it was equivalent to putting him out of all human 
society, and to the condemnation of him to a lingering death. 
So great, too, was the imaginative horror of it, apart from 
the physical sufferings which it entailed, that he might well 
have thought it a less terrible thing to be put to death 
by his tribe than to be put out of it. One sees in the 
histories of savages how any marked deviation from bodily 
uniformity — a deformity or other infirmity — which, rendering 
the individual much different from others, put him out of 
social uniformity, was a sufficient reason for abandoning or 
destroying him ; and one sees the persistence, until quite 
lately, of a similar feeling with regard to lunatics in civilised 
countries, whose treatment in consequence was extremely 
barbarous and cruel; for it was long after infirmities of body 
had ceased to excite aught but compassion that infirmities 
of mind continued to excite derision. Indeed, they do so 
still in some measure; for the term lunatic provokes laughter 



178 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

whenever it is uttered in the senate or on the stage, and the 
malady is commonly concealed as a shame by the family in 
which it occurs. Note again in this connection the tendency 
which savages and children show to laugh and jeer at bodily 
deformities, at the infliction of sufferings, and the like. 
Laughter, if we consider the meaning of it, is essentially a 
social feature, and no one likes to be put out of society, as it 
were, by being laughed at, even though he may have small 
respect for those who laugh at him. It is the instinctive 
fear of social extinction that constitutes half the agony of 
dying: the one anxiety that a dying person shows, when 
he shows any, is to be not left alone, but to have friendly 
faces around him ; for he feels vaguely that he is slipping 
away from his social surroundings and his hold on being, 
vanishing into the void and unknown, and he desires the re- 
assurance and stay of the familiar presence of friend or rela- 
tive to cling to, as the supports of life sink under him. 
Hence also it is that he commonly finds huge comfort 
in the attendance and services of those who are brought 
about him to administer spiritual consolations and to per- 
form the last offices of religion; they are the means of 
making for him a special and fitting social support, and of 
so helping him in the passage from the social environment 
that is slipping from his failing grasp, to another environ- 
ment dimly anticipated but looming mysterious and unde- 
fined ; and he leans with eagerness on the support at that 
juncture when life has so far waned in him as to occasion a 
tremulous forefeeling of its early extinction, but not yet so 
far as to blunt his apprehensions or to render him indifferent 
or unconscious. 

The creeds, superstitions, customs, ceremonials, laws, 
deities, demons, and the like, by which the social compres- 
sion and transformation of egoism have been effected, were 
not of course invented by the individual ; but certainly 
humanity invented them. Out of itself has it developed 
them, under the pressure of its environment, as the fitting 
agencies to determine its progress in the direction which 
that progress has taken. They were rude syntheses framed 
to give it some unity of action in its unequal conflict with 



THE COERCING FORCES OF SOCIAL UNION. 179 

the vast and unknown powers of nature which it found 
itself face to face with. Rude as they were, they have done 
their work in the guidance of conduct, and, having done it, 
they have faded away in the light of the progress which 
they have helped to make ; until now, when the knowledge 
of nature by civilised peoples has become so wide and search- 
ing as to leave them no nook to lurk in, we are left with the 
categorical imperative of the moral law as sole and supreme 
sanction. The progress has been from the graven image to 
what we may call the graven-image-idea of a personal God 
made after the fashion of man and issuing his code of com- 
mandments to him, and from that again to the abstract con- 
ception of a moral imperative. In its imperative rule which, 
whether innate in the individual or not, humanity has 
created, we see man once more make for himself the neces- 
sity which it is his freedom to obey. 

In noting the successive steps of a process of evolution 
in nature that does not stop short at man, but continues on- 
wards through his thinkings and doings, our proper office is 
to observe the successive facts and to trace the order of the 
becoming; we cannot in the least explain ivhy the becoming 
should be as it is. How indeed is it conceivable that we, 
parts of the process, beings of an hour, atomic units of an 
incomprehensible whole, could ever explain that which 
reaches from an infinite past and presses forward to an in- 
finite future, and of the pulse of which any attempted expla- 
nation is but a moment? "VVe are not bound, however, by 
this admission to conclude, as some do, that no step of the 
process could have been better than it was ; that all organs 
and organisms are most perfect in their kind, and could not 
in any respect have conceivably been more fit for their pur- 
poses than they are ; and that all the horrors, crimes, out- 
rages, sins, and sufferings of human doings from the 
beginning, being necessary steps, were the best possible 
events of a best possible process of human evolution. It 
were as legitimate to admit that every tree of a kind is 
perfect, which it manifestly is not, though as good as it 
could be in the chances and circumstances of its position ; 
or that the twisted horn of a ram which sometimes grows 



180 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

steadily through its eye into its brain, blinding it first and in 
the end killing it, unless the shepherd come to the rescue, is 
a very perfect thing of its kind. There are few creatures in 
which it would not be easy for a competent anatomist to 
suggest some improvements of construction to enable them 
to fulfil better the purposes they do fulfil ; and certainly it 
is not impossible to conceive that the human kind might 
have reached its present plane of development without 
some of the waste of life and agony that has been so marked 
a feature of the blood-stained course. 1 Considering the 
manifold gradations and modifications and degenerations of 
organic development, and the tedious transformations through 
which in the successions of the ages each organ and 
organism has reached its present form, it would appear that 
nature itself was profoundly dissatisfied with its work before 
it was able, by attaining to consciousness in its stage of 
human evolution, to know that it was so ; for instead of pro- 
nouncing a thing good of its kind after having produced it, 
its habit has been to set to work immediately to modify it 
into another kind, and not always for the better. The inter- 
mediate gradations which geological researches make known 
between the various groups of organic beings that now 
stand apart, what were they but so many transitional steps in 
construction abandoned soon after they were made, as if 
they had been proofs or essays ? And the same may be said 
of the successive races of men that, like leaves on trees, 
have come and gone through the measureless past. 

The facts of organic and human nature, when observed 
frankly and judged without bias, do not warrant the argument 
of a supreme and beneficent artificer working after methods 
of human intelligence, but perfect in all his works ; rather 
would they warrant, if viewed from the human standpoint, 
the conception of an almighty malignant power that was 
working out some far off end of its own, with the serenest 

1 To speak of a course as blood-stained seems from the human standpoint 
to convey something of a reproach. But from the standpoint of the whole 
the flow of blood may be as natural, as little repulsive, as the flow of water. 
Blood is instinctively revolting to man, because it is associated with the 
destruction of individuality, on which he naturally sets mighty store. 



THE COERCING FORCES OF SOCIAL UNION. 181 

disregard of the suffering, expenditure, and waste which 
were entailed in the process. Is it impious and unlawful 
for the feeble and imperfect understanding of a finite 
creature to presume to measure the perfection of the works 
of an incomprehensible and infinite Being, whose ways are 
past finding out, and in whose sight the highest human 
wisdom is foolishness? Be it so; but let it not then be 
overlooked that the argument for the existence of such a 
supreme artificer, drawn from a contemplation of his won- 
derful works or from any other revelation of him in human 
consciousness, is itself essentially and entirely anthropomor- 
phic ; that is to say, it is the transplantation into external 
nature of human notions of working to an end on certain 
lines which man, from his finite basis, agrees to think in- 
telligent, but which may after all be very stupid. If we 
cannot from the basis of our own capacities justly make the 
smaller inference of imperfect workmanship, what right 
have we from the same defective basis to make the larger 
inference of a conscious personal worker conceived in the 
image of ourselves and acting, like us, to accomplish ends 
which he, all-perfect Being, desires? For what does the 
theory postulate ? The Omnipotent and All-perfect in a state 
of desire and of accomplishment ! 

Speculations of this sort, however, are really void of any 
meaning. Ideas derived from conditional existence cannot 
apply to that which by the very nature of the case transcends 
the conditions of origin of the ideas. No human thought 
can extend itself beyond the relative; necessary truths are 
truths that are necessary within human experience; absolute 
truths are truths that are absolutely true within the limits 
of human relations ; the categorical imperative is the impera- 
tive which rules within the category of human being; they 
are all modes of finite thought and feeling, and no less rela- 
tive than are sounds or smells. No straining of metaphy- 
sical speculation will ever get us beyond ourselves — ever 
make the contents more than the continent, the grasp bigg 
than the hand. Infinite is a merely negative word, it is the 
negation of bounds, wof-finite ; and it is really to dupe our- 
selves with a vain imagination to make it something positive 



182 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

by naming it the infinite, and to use it thereafter as though 
it were the something. To us, measuring things by human 
intelligence, the seemingly prodigal waste of material, the 
multitudes of germs and seeds that perish timelessly, the 
numberless abortive failures of function and development, 
the slow and bungling methods of work ; a whole creation 
groaning and travailing through countless ages of pain and 
death in order at the end to issue in such a being as pri- 
meval man ; then, after his coming, countless ages more of 
human savagery and infinite waste of life, marked by suffer- 
ings so great that it might fairty be questioned whether all 
those that had gone before would fill up their measure ; until 
at length the time was come — not yet two thousand years 
ago — for the appearance of the Saviour who was to make 
atonement for the sin of which these were the consequences, 
and to proclaim for the first time the right law of life ; — all 
this must needs appear wasteful and bad workmanship. 
Have all these things been exactly necessary to produce a being 
who, for the first time, could suffer the pain of knowing and 
feeling them, and who then might make the self-crucifixion 
of the divine element in him the initiation of a higher pro- 
gress ? Given infinite power, however, and infinite time, and 
infinite material, what right have we to speak of the trans- 
cendent business in terms of our notions ? Quicken percep- 
tion so that a thousand years is as the twinkling of an eye 
to it, and what becomes of the waste and bungling ; retard 
it so that a moment is as a thousand years, and what waste 
and bungling might we not think to find in the now imper- 
ceptibly rapid stroke of a gnat's wing ? Yiew from a proper 
distance a cataract of water tumbling headlong from a moun- 
tain height, it appears a solid and motionless mass, * frozen 
by distance:' imagine oneself inside a molecule of seemingly 
inert matter, with senses fine and acute enough to perceive 
what goes on there, the complicated motions and harmonies 
of the solar system might seem simple by comparison with 
its intestine motions. Under different conditions of percep- 
tion the most nice, quick and exact adaptation of means to 
end which we know in nature might appear to be the very 
play of chance, and the success of it a mere accident. 



THE COERCING FORCES OF SOCIAL UNION. 183 

While perceiving a process of organic evolution going 
steadily on, hovvbeit in what appears to us a very wasteful 
fashion, we ought not to overlook the fact that side by side 
with it everywhere there is, as Lamarck did not fail to point 
out, a process of degeneracy. All the changes that take 
place are not ascending steps of evolution, some of them are 
descending steps of degeneration ; not all of them events of 
a becoming, many of them events of an unbecoming ; not all 
of them the products of doing, many of them the products of 
an undoing ; organisms undergoing degenerative modifica- 
tions that render them less fit for their purposes, and retro- 
grade organic products being formed that act to produce dis- 
solution. There is, so to speak, a broad and easy way lead- 
ing to degeneration, decay and death, which is the opposite 
of the steep and narrow path that leads to evolution and 
fuller life. The principle of good and the principle of evil 
in the world, which have been recognised by all peoples in 
all ages under one form or another by way of explanations 
of positive facts of observation, may be taken to be primitive 
intuitions of these opposite laws of evolution and degeneracy. 
Nay, one may perhaps venture to go further and say that 
the theory of a fall from a state of perfection and happiness, 
whereby sin and suffering gained entrance into the world, 
was a one-sided generalisation from facts, made instinctively 
to account for phenomena which are the outcome of the law 
of degeneracy in nature. Having made this generalisation, 
it became necessary, first, to account for such a downward 
tendency, and afterwards to reconcile with it the evidence 
of an opposite progressive tendency, which also could not 
escape observation: hence two theories — the theory of an 
expulsion from bliss in consequence of disobedience inspired 
by the evil principle, whereby things went wrong ; and the 
complementary theory of an atonement for the sin by the 
good principle, whereby things became capable of amendment 
and mended. At present we fix attention too much perhaps 
on the process of evolution, to the overlooking of the corre- 
lative process of degeneration that is going on, not only 
in low but in high organisms; not only in the low but in the 
high functions of the higher organisms; not only in body 



184 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

but in mind ; not only in characters but in beliefs ; not only 
in individuals but in societies ; not only in societies but in 
nations. 

That the supreme artificer produces these degenerations 
and all the sufferings, sharp and lingering, which the 
working out of them in so wide and various domains of 
nature means, or permits them for his own wise and inscru- 
table purposes — a wisdom safely predicated that in the same 
breath is declared to be inscrutable — is a satisfactory theory 
to the theologian, who acknowledges that there cannot be 
'evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it,' and a theory 
which has been the most powerful of all agencies in promot- 
ing the social evolution of mankind ; but it will not equally 
satisfy always those who fail to see sufficient reason why 
man should put a magnified personality of his own fashion 
and fashioning into and over nature, making it co-extensive 
with infinity of time and space : a being of anthropomorphic 
construction who from a human basis is yet built up of the 
negations of all positive human conceptions, being infinite, 
incomprehensible, meffable, mvisible, mscrutable, inconceiv- 
able, ^corporeal, immortal. The sum of a multitude of 
negations making one, and that The One ! 



SECTION VII. 

CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 

I proceed now to examine the nisus of evolution in its 
highest expressions in the great organism of humanity, pur- 
posing to find in it the foundation and inspiration of certain 
feelings, aspirations, and beliefs which, being widely spread 
amongst mankind and not easy to account for, have been 
thought to be intuitions of supernatural origin. The fact is 
notable that men have often believed that they possessed 
another and higher source of knowledge than the senses, 
whether called supernatural inspiration, mystical intuition, 
divine reminiscence, or by whatever other name; even so 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 185 

decided an advocate of the transformation of sensation into 
knowledge as Condillac allowed that they did possess supra- 
sensual intuition when they were in the garden of Eden, 
maintaining only that they lost it on the occasion of their 
expulsion therefrom. Now whence have sprung the notions 
of a past golden age when all was peace and happiness, and 
of a life to come after death when sorrow and death shall be 
no more? Whence that fair fable of the morning and that 
fond vision of the evening? Was it perhaps that the 
pageant of radiant glory in the heavens which oftentimes 
heralds the rising, and follows in the train of the setting 
sun, was applied by a natural transference to the rising and 
setting of human life? If the different refractions of the 
vibrations of light by intervening vapours were the true cause 
of the glorious myth, as of the glorious spectacle, well may 
Kant be said to have drunk confusion to Newton who, by the 
discovery of the spectrum, had destroyed the poetry of the 
rainbow. However that be, the belief of a future state of 
immortality is so widespread and firmly fixed, so instinc- 
tively urgent apparently, that the existence of it is often ad- 
duced as an irrefutable argument of its truth. Is it then 
actually a prophetic forefeeling which mankind has had 
more or less dimly from the beginning and will have more 
and more clearly to the end; or is it the survival of an 
ancient superstition that is gradually undergoing extinction, 
with no higher authority for its alleged universality than its 
natural prevalence as a belief proper to a certain immature 
stage of the development of human thought? For it is 
certainly true of beliefs, as of organisms, that they sur- 
vive in the world in retrograde or degenerate states for a 
long time after changes in the medium have rendered 
their former functions obsolete and them unfit to perform 
them. 

Whence again do men obtain their eager aspirations 
after a higher ideal of understanding, feeling, and conduct 
than earth has ever known? Here is a human ideal, an 
ideal made by nature through man, which, however, nature 
has never realised, and is always as far as ever from realis- 
ing, because as practice improves the ideal rises in propor- 
13 



186 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

tion. Moreover, the ideal, in order to be realised, must have 
its ideal social conditions, which it is impossible it should 
ever have ; for it is the initial variation of a higher develop- 
ment, which has to adapt itself in the best way it can, that 
is, with the least prejudice to its own higher nature, to ex- 
isting social conditions, and in so doing to improve them. 
No little ridicule has at different times been thrown on 
Lamarck's notion that it is the want or need which creates 
the organ by minute increments of growth, and it is a notion 
which easily lends itself to ridicule ; but what have we in 
the ideal but a sense of want in the highest mental organ- 
isation, a yearning or striving to satisfy itself and an 
impulse to development in consequence ? Why may not the 
impulse that manifests itself in consciousness as a want be 
displayed essentially by developing organic matter, albeit 
without consciousness? What Lamarck may be said to 
have done was to describe the nisus in terms of conscious- 
ness instead of discovering the organic nisus beneath the 
conscious want. Be that as it may, however, it is plainly 
necessary for mankind to have its ideal, if it is to make 
progress ; when it has lost the imagination of a state of per- 
fection which never is but always is to be, it will have lost 
the impulse of evolution and have entered on the path of its 
decline. Does not instinct, if we consider it well, signify a 
desire or want of something which is not actually appre- 
hended, a dumb craving for the unknown? The analysis of 
will, when we make it, brings us to desire enlightened and 
guided by reason, that is, to the want of a known and ap- 
proved object; but if we carry the analysis deeper down from 
complex desire to the most simple desire and thence to ap- 
petite, we come at last to the question — Why a desire or 
appetite for something before that which is desired is known ? 
Consciousness does not make the desire ; it is that which lies' 
beneath consciousness in the desire that stirs the conscious- 
ness, the unconscious appetite that makes the conscious 
desire. W r e must plant ourselves at the last on the funda- 
mental property of life to maintain and increase itself, and 
we then find ourselves resting on the eternal nisus of evolu- 
tion. So that by this way of proceeding we perceive again 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 187 

that our highest mental aspirations to the ideal are truly 
the highest evolutional manifestations as they take place in 
human consciousness. It is curious to note by the way here 
how man's two fundamental instincts, the self-conservative 
and the propagative, may be discovered at the foundations 
respectively of the two great doctrines of materialism and 
idealism ; the former, coarse and common, so to speak, having 
immediate respect to the present, and the latter, more refined 
and glowing with the glamour of love, having a large 
respect to the future. 

Whence the categorical imperative of the moral sense ? 
Whence the instinctive feeling of a self -determining will, 
in defiance of all arguments demonstrating its inclusion 
within the law of conservation of energy — a feeling that 
inspires the conviction of something different from any other 
sort of determination within human experience and sub- 
stantially warrants the persistence of the disputes concerning 
freedom ? We are to inquire now whether the answers to 
these questions, so far as they can be answered, are not to 
be sought in the fathomable operations of the unfathom- 
able impulse of evolution ; of which it may truly be said that 
it cometh from afar, was before man was, works in his 
progress, prophesies in his instincts and aspirations, inspires 
his faiths, is interpreted lamely in his creeds, and its end is 
not yet. 

The doctrine of evolution substitutes a continuous 
creation for a creation by separate shocks, and thereby 
nowise lessens the mystery of the universe. To say that 
nature produces an organ or a species, or that it is produced 
by evolution, or that it comes by a process of becoming, is 
to say exactly the same thing in different words ; there is 
not a jot more light in one statement, as a general state- 
ment, than in another. Certainly there is not creation in 
the sense of the making of something out of nothing ; no 
addition takes place to the whole sum of matter and energy 
in the universe ; the new thing which is the product of the 
old, but not the old, having its own properties or functions, 
is obtained by the transformation of lower kinds of force 
and matter, and is capable of equivalent resolution iuto them 



188 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

again. 1 A new organism is the product of precedent 
organisms and of the external conditions of the medium, 
but it is neither the precedent organism nor the external 
conditions; nor is it merely the arithmetical sum or me- 
chanical compound of them; it is a new product with 
properties of its own, distinctly autonomous. But to endow 
it with autonomy of function is not to ascribe to it spontaneity 
either of being or function ; it has not been built up out of 
the void, nor does it live but in relation to a medium ; and 
always an external stimulus, direct or indirect, is required 
to act upon the stored energies of its structures, and so to 
liberate what seem at first sight remote and disproportionate 
effects. 

Let this conception be applied to the highest functions 
of the most complex nervous organisation as they are 
manifest in the operations of mind ; and in particular to 
that purposive determination of energy that follows de- 
liberation — namely, to will. Motives are * necessary antece- 
dents of will, but assuredly will is not motive, nor is it 
simply the sum of the foregoing motives; it is a new 
product, the outcome of antecedents certainly, but autono- 
mous. Here then may be the ground of a sort of recon- 
ciliation between those who advocate freewill and those who 
advocate determinism. On the one hand is the absolute 
certitude that will is not the mechanical consequence nor 
the arithmetical sum of the antecedent motives, that it 
possesses and exhibits more than can be discerned in them ; 
on the other hand is the equal certitude that motives, secret 
and open, near and remote, explicit in consciousness and 
incorporate in faculty, always do go before an act of will 
and are pre-essential to it. On either side there is a grasp 
of that part of the truth which is overlooked by the other 

1 Is the intellect of a Shakspeare or a Newton capable then of being ac- 
counted for by any transformation of natural forces, or of being resolved into 
any imaginable equivalence of forces ? Those who put such a question with 
scorn as one that is utterly ridiculous, should first inquire and explain why a 
Shakspeare or Newton could not possibly appear among a tribe of savages, 
and why, if the impossible events did take place, the productions of their 
mighty intellects would be nil. After that exposition the discussion might 
begin. 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 189 

side : may not the two sides then unite in the conclusion 
that precedent motives are necessary constituents of will, 
but that the qualities of the product are special, its functions 
autonomous ? It needs no disquisition to make it probable, 
after what has gone before, that this autonomy of will, 
which we recognise as a scientific conclusion, according to 
the apprehension of sense and in conformity with our ex- 
perience of other natural phenomena, will declare itself to 
the internal apprehension of consciousness as a strong senti- 
ment of freewill : that which is autonomy objectively will be 
self-determination subjectively. There is not an inde- 
pendence of every influence, but a more or less exclusive de- 
pendence on internal influences. 

When we perceive in a department of natural laws the 
appearance of a phenomenon that is not governed by those 
laws, but witnesses to the intervention of laws from another 
and higher domain of nature, it is not sound philosophy to 
seek for the source of these in spiritual abstractions or in 
supernatural inspirations ; our duty is to ascend into the 
higher and unknown domain, and to study its natural laws 
by the same methods which we have used successfully in the 
lower domains where we have made ourselves at home. The 
intrusions from on high should not be wondered at as super- 
natural, but studied as the events of a higher natural 
domain. On the other hand, it is not sound science to 
apply the known laws of the phenomena of the lower 
domain to an entire explanation of the phenomena of the 
higher domain ; still less to beguile oneself into the belief 
of an explanation by the vague misapplication of the special 
terms of the former, which have definite meanings in their 
proper use and place, to the more complex phenomena of 
the latter, where they not only do not cover and fit the facts, 
but have their own exact significations blurred and de- 
faced by the misuse. In the knowledge of organic functions, 
how full soever it may be, we shall not find the adequate 
explanation of social phenomena. Physiology analyses and 
decomposes and recomposes man as an organic being into a 
variety of structures and a multitude of reactions, and dis- 
plays their relations in the organic whole ; but it is sociology 



190 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

which must then take up the tale and investigate his functions 
as a man amongst men united in a society, discerning and 
displaying hi3 nature and functions as a social and moral 
being. The social organism is not a mere physiological 
organism ; it is that and a great deal more, being essentially 
of historical significance, and requiring, in order to be under- 
stood, the study of antecedent social states ; and it will 
demand in the end a new and more complex conception of 
organism than anything that physiology alone can furnish. 
In its domain we get beyond physical, chemical and physio- 
logical laws, as we know those laws, just as in the domain of 
physiology we get beyond physical and chemical laws, as we 
know physical and chemical laws ; we meet with higher 
autonomies, but in no case, not even in the highest, is it an 
inspiration from heaven which giveth the autonomy ; it is 
always the inspiration that is on earth and is manifested in 
every pulse of evolution. 

The will of man being the outcome of supreme reason is 
the highest and latest evolved energy in nature ; it is in 
fact the power by which nature developing through man 
accomplishes the progressing path of its destiny, the nature- 
made mean by which nature is made better. Acted upon 
continually by his environment, physical and social, and 
reacting upon it, man incorporates by involution in the 
structure and constitution of his nervous system the essential 
abstractions of these adaptive interactions, co-ordinates in 
complex reasoning their manifold relations, and exhibits the 
outcome of energy in a well-informed will; and it, in its 
highest expression, is the initiation of a new step in evolution. 
Past and present experiences are its constituent factors, but 
it is itself more than experience, for it is productive, creative, 
thus pushing forth prophetically into the unknown. Like 
instinct, in the realisation of its energy it seeks for what it 
has not and knows not ; indeed, in its true creative, which is 
its least conscious, expression we might describe it as the 
highest instinct of development. In that supreme function 
it is not attended with any consciousness of freedom, because 
man is then one with nature, his relations with it not broken 
into conscious incompletenesses, but consciousness absorbed 



CEKTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 191 

and extinguished in their full harmony. It may be the senti- 
ment of freedom that he has is not really the sentiment of 
his own freedom, as he supposes, but the sentiment of the 
freedom of nature working in him, he being a poor channel 
of it ; for as he by his nature as individual is part only of a 
whole, he cannot in that relation be free. But the whole 
which, encompassing him, yet works in him, may seem to 
his self-consciousness free, and so produce the illusion of his 
freedom ; its part in him having a dimly conscious intimation 
of its share in the being and freedom of that which transcends 
him. In any case, however, it is not so much a definite 
consciousness as an indefinite thrill of sentiment, which we 
translate into a too definite consciousness. Now the right 
aim of will must plainly be to escape from the limitation of 
self and to gain the full freedom of nature by becoming one 
with it — to surmount self by losing the consciousness of self. 
Freewill then is not the relic of a higher faculty which man 
once had in the past, it is rather an aim or ideal of the 
future ; a creation of the imagination which inflames the 
notion of duty and fortifies the ought through the desire 
that it inspires to realise the ideal. 

The path of moral law in social evolution is without 
doubt the present aim of the highest will ; and it is in the 
inspiration of this aim, and in the autonomy of the function, 
that we discover the origin and the authority of the cate- 
gorical moral imperative. Thou shalt go the right way of 
development, thou shalt not go the wrong way of degenera- 
tion : such the explicit declaration of its instinctive beat iu 
the heart, such the reason of the understanding confirming 
the deeper reason of the heart. Believing ourselves the best 
in nature we are bound to believe the moral aspirations of 
the best specimens of us to represent the highest point of 
the evolution of will, and to mark the direction of its future 
development. The basis and sanction of morality, whatever 
its subjective value, has its clear objective value and warrant 
in the welfare and progress of the social organism which it 
promotes. Were the internal sanction abolished the external 
authority would still be imperative. 1 That is a consideration 
1 Should it turn out in the end that morality has this inner authority in 



192 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

which may embolden us to dispense with, the multitudinous 
theoretical discussions concerning the supernatural source 
and authority of the internal sanction ; and the more easily so 
since such disquisitions for the most part are reweavings 
of the same quantity of old substance into more or less new 
patterns according to the predilections of the performers, 
laborious attempts to get explicit in the inference more than 
is implicit in the premiss. Now a real addition to knowledge 
can take place only by a positive addition to the substance ; 
and that must come not from subjective exploration but from 
objective observation. The rule of morality is implicit in 
practice before it is explicit in thought — must be acquired by 
involution before it can be unfolded in evolution ; and the 
basis of it must be sought where the substance of all thought 
has to be sought — in conduct. It is not from consciousness 
but from life that the obligation comes primarily. A logical 
machine might conceivably draw the inference which is 
implicit in the premiss ; the acutest understanding will not 
elicit and unfold the theory that is not latent in the practice. 
Notwithstanding the many differences in the qualities and 
quantity of the moral contents among different nations and 
in different ages, there is everywhere discoverable this com- 
mon positive basis — namely, the obligation to follow a line 
of conduct sanctioned as good, and to avoid a line of conduct 
prohibited as bad, by the social body ; the bad actions being 
such as were believed to be hurtful, and the good actions 
such as were believed to be useful to it. By no means was 
it thereby hindered from happening, as it did indeed happen, 
that the prohibitions and sanctions esteemed moral in a 
rude society were such as would be deemed actually immoral 
in a higher society. The whole business is relative: the 
individual member of a community must have a regard 
beyond self in the larger regard which he owes to the 
welfare of the whole ; the particular community again must 
have regard to a larger whole than itself, and that whole, even 
if national, to the larger whole of humanity ; so that it may 

intuition, this practical imperative of pure consciousness, then it will have 
the good fortune to enjoy a double certitude, because of the agreement in it 
of the two independent methods by which it is established. 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 193 

well happen that an act that is moral in its immediate 
relations is immoral in its relations to the larger whole — 
for example, self-sacrificing devotion to an individual a sin 
against society, a patriotic sacrifice of self to the nation a 
crime against humanity. The inspiration of the larger 
whole imparts the ideal to which the aspiration is. See 
what happens now when a person of lofty virtue does not 
get the approbation which he feels that his conduct deserves, 
but instead thereof is misunderstood and misinterpreted. 
He appeals in his heart to an ideal moral sentiment — to one, 
as it were, within him with whom he is in intuitive moral 
communion, and reconciles himself to suffer wrong patiently 
in the sure conviction that his conscience is the approving 
voice of that power within him : in other words, he appeals 
to the ideal moral feeling of humanity immanent in him, the 
ideal, that is, which humanity pursues, enjoining it in his 
conscience, and which he, personifying it in his own image, 
as his habit is, interprets as ' God spake these words and 
said.' And here one cannot help being somewhat disturbed 
by the question — To what larger whole than itself shall 
humanity have regard? Will it discover for itself a saving 
ideal in aspirations to do the service of a cosmical whole ? 
Or will it be left finally without an ideal? When it comes 
to pass that humanity, fully constituted, is sensible of no 
vital relation to anything higher and larger than itself, and 
longs for no fuller life in the aim to attain a higher life 
outside itself, it will then have reached the term of its de- 
velopment and the beginning of the end. The impulse of 
evolution will have been exhausted in it. 

We think habitually of will as individual and conscious 
activity, a witting energy, the conscious outcome of careful 
deliberation looking before and after; but when w r e think of 
its operation in the evolution of mankind, it is necessary to 
think of it rather as unconscious, blind, instinctive, preg- 
nant with a future which, hidden in its aspirations, it brings 
to pass : it is a mighty tide of becoming that is broken into 
so many ripples of individual and conscious energies, a deep 
tranquil stream which, flowing beneath the tumultuous 
waves and angry surges of the surface, makes aspirations 



194 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

prophecies, and man in his progress ever wiser than his 
creeds. One might compare it in this respect to the instinct 
of the insect which, having never seen its parents, lays up a 
store of food for a progeny that it will never see; or might 
perhaps describe it in St. Paul's words as the earnest expec- 
tation of creation that waiteth for a fulfilment, which, how- 
ever, when it has come, becomes the immediate basis of a 
new expectation. Each mortal, eager in busy energy, does 
his little piece of work in his particular sphere, consciously 
or unconsciously aiding or hindering the development of the 
social organism of which he is a part ; but it is not any part 
but the whole, not a unit but the organism in its integral 
form, which gives the destined direction to the sum of the 
functions of its many and various units — that is to say, 
which creates the ideal to which the individual aspires. 
The sum of the multitudinous units of consciousness is a 
moving whole which, though vaguely consensible perhaps, is 
not conscious. For the great organism of humanity does not 
foresee where it is going as it progresses, nor deliberately 
foreordain its path of evolution; it has no common senso- 
rium, so to speak — as it may one day have, should the 
vaguely consensible become the definitely conscious — whereby 
to attain unity of feeling and to direct consciously its 
course ; it moves forward in development slowly, irregularly, 
intermittently or remittently, blindly, answering in its move- 
ment no doubt to the sum of the energies of its constituents 
in relation to its environment, but at the same time inform- 
ing and determining the units of the future by imparting to 
them their idealism. Mighty busy beings for a little whilo 
are the units, but infinitesimally minute aids or hindrances 
to the great movement of evolution whose end they know 
not. 

To speak of the will of man as a mode of a universal will 
in nature, tempting though it be, ought not to be allowed to 
pass as if it were not a piece of pure anthropomorphism. 
We have no actual right to conclude from the character of 
the conditioned conscious energy in us as to the character 
of the unconditioned energy outside us ; for it is the mark of 
our limitation, not the warrant of objective truth, that we 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 195 

cannot do otherwise than represent the power outside our- 
selves in terms of ourselves. We please ourselves to in- 
terpret it in the language of experience, but it is actually 
uninterpretable in that language. A chemical molecule, 
were it capable of it, might just as well conclude that the one 
prevailing energy of which its particular energy was a mode 
was chemical energy. Himself a moment between those im- 
potences of thought which he calls infinities, man's will is 
necessarily the poor reflex of his limitations ; what is true of 
it cannot possibly be true of that which has not his nor any 
limitations ; and to describe it at all in words which, being 
human, are meaningless in such application — even so much as 
to name it — is only a little less anthropomorphic than to speak 
of it as the Will of a Personal God made in the image of man. 
For assuredly, when we think well of it, it was not God who 
made man in his image, it is man who has always made God 
in his image ; in the image of man has he made Him. 

How far has Kant really advanced matters by his great 
doctrine of practical reason? In proclaiming the freedom 
of will and the moral imperative to be not, like the know- 
ledge acquired by the understanding, relative and pheno- 
menal, but the thing-in-itself, absolute, incomprehensible — 
feelable in some strange fashion, though not knowable, by a 
self — he has done little more than translate into his philo- 
sophical language, and into language which, being relative, 
will not anyhow carry the absolute thing-in-itself, the com- 
mon opinion of a Divine inspiration ; for what he has done 
is to ascribe to incomprehensible freewill the place of that 
incomprehensible which men call God, and to put the cate- 
gorical moral imperative in the stead of ' God spake these 
words and said.' With this disadvantage too : that whereas 
what God spake and said was clear, certain, precise, and 
absolutely authoritative, we are left by Kant without any 
certain criterion of what the moral imperative categorically 
ordains in the particular case ; are referred in our troubles 
of conscience to the common-place utilitarian standard of 
the good of society. Moreover, what is to be said of the 
consistency of a philosophy which, pronouncing all know- 
ledge to be phenomenal and relative, in the same breath 



196 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

declares any affection of an individual self, let it be the senti- 
ment or intuition of liberty or duty, to be more than rela- 
tive? 

It is the fashion nowadays among metaphysical psycho- 
logists to assume that we owe to Kant's critical acumen the 
modern doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, and they 
almost imply, from the great credit which they award him, 
that but for him modern science could not have existed. 
But the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge was not his 
discovery ; we owe it really to the discoveries of the physio- 
logists who made known the true functions of the senses ; 
and it might be argued with some show of reason that if 
Kant were dropped clean out between Hume and modern 
science its positive gains would be very much what they are 
now. Whenever a good stream of positive scientific thought 
begins to emerge from its brooding latency into explicit 
light it easily runs into two different courses : the one an 
easy, vague, dispersive expression in theoretical and more or 
less ingenious disquisitions, by which it is soon dissipated 
in wasteful inanities of bog and marsh ; the other, a slow, 
tedious, sober, and fruitful progress through patient scientific 
observations and verifications. The actual filiation was not 
from Kant to modern science, as his disciples assume, but 
from the stream of tendency of which Kant was a meta- 
physical offshoot. Hegel supplies an example of a similar 
metaphysical deviation from the quiet stream of positive 
science. The modern doctrine of organic evolution, or pro- 
gressive development, as it used to be called, is much the 
same as Hegel's fundamental doctrine of the immanent 
spontaneous evolution of the absolute ; indeed it is the same 
doctrine set forth in terms of matter instead of terms of 
metaphysics. Self-evolution of the absolute, progressing 
from difference to difference, these differences, themselves 
mere moments within it, being combined into higher and 
higher unity : the absolute impelled by the principle of 
progress within itself to higher and higher differences, and 
through them to higher and higher unity : — what is that but 
the progress from the simple and general to the complex 
and special which in Hegel's time was recognised as the 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 197 

order of organic development, and which since his time 
has become known as the law of evolution through 
differences to more complex unities. To conclude, however, 
that the scientific conception of evolution, whose true 
modern parentage lies mainly with Yon Baer and Lamarck, 
owes its origin in any degree to Hegel, would be grossly 
absurd. Indeed, it is pretty certain that if Hegel and all 
his works had been thrown into the sea, and no mention 
more heard of him and them, the scientific conception of 
evolution would not have been delayed an hour. Another 
striking example of the speculative deviation of positive 
thought from its true path of sober progress is in process of 
display at the present day. Since Darwin brought the 
doctrine of evolution into the full current of scientific 
thought, and aroused the eager attention of all the world to 
it, by his admirable exposition of natural selection as the 
main means of its accomplishment, there has been a large 
development of purely theoretical philosophy in which evo- 
lution has been tracked with overstrained ingenuity into all 
holes and corners of nature, and a word meaning the un- 
folding or becoming of things has been proved triumphantly 
to explain how all things have become. In the meantime 
the quiet stream of positive scientific inquiry into the par- 
ticular problems of evolution, along which the real fruit will 
have to be gathered at the last, makes slow way and obtains 
little notice. 

To return to the course of our inquiry. Having found 
the basis of freewill and of the moral sanction in the evolu- 
tional nisus in its social sphere, I go on now to inquire 
whether some other fundamental beliefs are not similarly 
rooted in it. Without doubt there have prevailed very 
widely, though not universally, among mankind the sad 
tradition of a lost or forfeited life of perfection and happi- 
ness and a dim expectation or the firm assurance of a future 
life of perfection and happiness. Now if we know anything 
certain of the beginnings of human life it is that man lias 
risen in estate, not fallen from a higher estate— at any rate 
on earth, whatever may have been the case on the moon or 
on Mars when they were theatres of life; that there n» 



198 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

was such a golden age of peace and happiness as he has 
fabled ; that he has never been greater and nobler than he 
is now. Moreover, if we can predict anything safely in this 
business from the basis of our existing natural knowledge, 
we can predict that though he may well rise higher than he 
is now, he will not have any such life after death as he has 
consoled and beguiled himself by imagining. Where then 
has he obtained his tradition of a glorious past? Whence 
have come to him those immortal longings that make him 
feel 

Through all his fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness ? 

Theologians naturally declare them to be the intuitions of 
a special religious sense, since they are sure the systematised 
knowledge of sense and reason cannot give a satisfactory ac- 
count of them. Whencesoever derived, they must have their 
sufficient reason ; their influence in human events has been 
unspeakably momentous ; and no science of human nature 
can be complete which fails to take adequate account of 
them and their effects, and to tell us how they have come, 
if they have a natural origin. Are we not entitled to look 
upon them as the imaginative interpretations of an instinct 
springing into consciousness from the upward striving im- 
pulse which, immanent in man as part and crown of organic 
nature, ever throbs in his heart as the inspiration of hope, 
of aspiration, of faith in things unseen? Imagination, as 
its manner is, constructs modes or forms of satisfaction of 
the instinct in conformity with the co-existing state of 
mental development ; and accordingly the schemes of future 
fulfilment invented by different peoples in different epochs 
do not fail to present a considerable variety, and to differ 
too in character according to the different characters of the 
peoples of the same epoch ; not otherwise than as the c bon 
Dieu' of France differs from the 'God ' of a Scotch Calvinist. 
Certainly it was not difficult for man at any time to picture 
to himself a much happier life than he was living, since he 
could easily imagine it without its most urgent present suf- 
ferings, just as he could imagine men who were giants or 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 199 

who lived for a thousand years ; it was not surprising there- 
fore that he should conclude the feeling of a happier possi- 
bility to be either the consequence, the faint reminiscence, of 
a better life which had been actually lived before historical 
time, or the dim forefeeling, the prophetic instinct, of a 
better life to come — either a Paradise of the past or a Para- 
dise of the future. We conclude then that these inventions, 
adapted, like poetical justice, to give the mind satisfaction 
in that wherein the nature of things denies it, have sprung 
from the instinctive forefeeling of a higher human destiny 
with which the nisus of evolution working in and through 
man inspires his imagination. Given the instinct, which is 
indisputable, it is easy to understand how all the rest must 
follow, when we reflect upon the way imagination has worked 
to people the unknown with extraordinary beings constructed 
after the fashion of its ordinary experience, but on a much 
larger scale of goodness and grandeur, or of badness and 
terror — gods, that is, of the earth and the air, of unseen 
upper and unseen under regions, anthropomorphic personifi- 
cations of the unknown powers of nature that awed man 
into abasement and adoration. 

The psychologist who discovers an adequate philosophy of 
mind by peering into his own mind, thus making his con- 
sciousness the measure of the universe of thought and things, 
is content to think he has explained something when he has 
pronounced it to be the work of the imagination or the ima- 
ginative faculty : by invoking diligently his own conscious- 
ness he has had this pregnant oracle uttered to him — to wit, 
that mind working in that mode which it is agreed to call 
imagination has done it. Meanwhile he reveals mighty little 
by the discovery to any one who has not the Brahmin-like 
faculty of obtaining intuition by gazing intently at his own 
navel. What we really want to know is not whether Imagi- 
nation, <pavTa(TLa, Einbildung, or any other descriptive term 
has done it, but what is the foundation of this productive or 
creative function of mind which is so named, and what are 
its material correlates in bodily structure and function ? It 
is obvious that experience and reason can only acquaint us 
with the actual and its relations, taking us along the beaten 



200 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

tracks of things as they are, and instructing us how to move 
from one to another ; they never can, as imagination does, 
inspire and urge us to strike out the new paths of things as 
they are not ; to combine and arrange the actual of experi- 
ence into new forms of thought, so " bodying forth the forms 
of things unknown,' and giving ' to aery nothings a local habi- 
tation and a name ; * to frame theories that shall fit experi- 
ences never had, and to foresee and foretell what those 
experiences will be ; to fashion ideals, ' creating every bad a 
perfect best.' These operations are the effects and evidence 
of the evolutional nisus working in the nature of man, in 
mind as the highest outcome of it, and in imagination as 
the highest function of mind ; wherefore the best products 
of imagination are the last events of the evolution of nature, 
they represent the highest becoming thereof through man. 
Here indeed it is that we catch nature putting forth the 
shoots of its latest development, many of them certainly 
vain and abortive, like the countless multitudes of seeds and 
germs that come to naught, but others of them that live and 
thrive, and so do their part to carry on the evolution of the 
great organism of humanity. 

In this relation let it be borne well in mind always, 
that imagination cannot work in its best productive way 
except it be fed and sustained and informed by an under- 
standing that is of large capacity and good culture, is in 
wide and exact and intimate sympathy with nature, social 
and physical, and thus gathers up what is behind and 
around, combines it in true forms of thought, and lays a 
sound and solid basis for the forward-reaching work of ima- 
ginative creation. Not voluntary nor even conscious are its 
workings ; they are mobile, spontaneous, capricious, and un- 
certain, not subiect to direct mental control and not to be 
explained by logic. The voluntary aim should be to lay up in 
a well-trained understanding a good store of co-ordinated 
material and of sound notional relations by which it may be 
fitly fed and informed. Goethe said of himself, 'What I 
have not loved I have never translated into verse or prose. 
I have never made love-poems when I was not in love ; ' nor 
did he write poems about nature without being informed 



CEKTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 201 

with facts gathered from every source, which he allowed to 
sink deep into his mind and to brood there until they came 
forth animate in fit imaginative forms of truth and beauty. 
Divorced from a good understanding, imagination strays into 
all sorts of fanciful vagaries — into reckless generalisations 
and ill-grounded hypotheses in science, into wild theories in 
politics, into extravagant inanities in poetry, into ill-con- 
ceived and ridiculous productions of art, into thin evolutions 
of all sorts wanting the substantial basis of previous involu- 
tions ; but these abortive vagaries are so many proofs of the 
inexhaustible strength of its ever-budding life : countless vari- 
ations that perish if so be that one live and thrive. Seldom 
indeed, not more than once in a century perhaps, is it in- 
spired by the highest reason, and its work clothed in the 
forms thereof. To look back upon the incalculable amount 
and the inexhaustible variety of work which, ill nourished 
by observation, and ill informed by reason, it has done in the 
past, on the vast waste of energy which its records show, is 
to lay a solid basis of hope of the progress it will make in 
time to come when it shall be well nourished by sound obser- 
vation and well informed by enlightened reason. 

It is evident that true imagination is vastly different from 
fancy ; far from being merely a playful outcome of mental 
activity, a thing of joy and beauty only, it performs the ini- 
tial and essential functions in every branch of human deve- 
lopment. And has always done so, even though its products, 
after having discharged their temporary functions, have 
dwindled and disappeared; for always it has peopled that 
realm of the ideal which has countervailed the oppression 
and gloom of the real. How could men ever have faced suc- 
cessfully in the first instance the unknown, vast and over- 
whelming forces of nature, how welded themselves trader 
their pressure into the unity, confidence, and strength of 
social growth, if they had not created for themselves gods of 
the air, of the earth, and of the sea, of the hearth, of the 
city, and of the nation, whose anger they might hope to pro- 
pitiate, and whose favour they might hope to win P Could 
the Israelites, though pliant, patient and tenacious then M 
now, have made their painful way through the wilderness 
14 



202 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

from the bondage of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan 
without their strong faith in the special and jealous God of 
Israel, greater than the gods of the heathen, who divided for 
them the waters of the sea, sent them food from heaven, 
caused water to gush out of the stony rock, set his interpos- 
ing fiat between the dead and the living, and stayed the 
plague by which they were devastated? 'And the Lord 
prospered him in everything that he did, because he did 
that which was right in the sight of the Lord,' would be the 
approving comment that a Jewish historian would make 
upon the character and doings of a ruler who, outside the 
tribal or national bounds, had been a monster of savage ini- 
quity, and who, had he lived now, would be thought to have 
earned eternal infamy. But the Jehovah of Jewish worship, 
though nominally accepted still, is virtually a conception of 
the past, like Jove, Vishnu, and Baal, and other extinct gods, 
having been practically superseded by a higher conception of 
Deity. For imagination is nowise disheartened because its 
offspring perish one after another ; with never failing pro- 
ductive energy it goes on to create anew, taking refuge in 
heaven when driven from earth, throwing the soft glamour 
of the ideal over the sadness of the real, infusing the faith 
and hope that inspire the strife of life and console its close. 

Let me take notice here how admirably the evolutional 
nisus in its two aspects of the objective in nature and of the 
subjective in imagination is identified, becoming one, as it 
were, in the passion and fruition of love ; how the sensual 
need and impulse works intimately with the imagination, in- 
spiring it and clothing itself with the colours and forms 
thereof, so as to make the union the complete and ecstatic 
exercise of the energies of the whole being ; a rapture of 
delight blending the individual and nature for the moment 
in an act which the most highly rational beings hasten to, 
hide as a shame, and than which, objectively regarded, 
there is not anything more ridiculous in all the world. 
The supreme joy in nature is plainly production or creation, 
subjective or objective, and the supremest joy that pro- 
ductive activity in which they are identified. Behold how 
specially bride and bridegroom are adorned for the function, 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 203 

and with what hymeneal joy and festivities their union is 
solemnised, as well in the bright homes of civilisation as in 
the cruelty-full habitations of the dark places of the earth ; 
how vegetable and animal nature is arrayed in its most 
glorious apparel, and the irrepressible joy thereof bursts 
forth in multitudinous ecstasies and harmonies of odours, 
colours and songs; how man is transported with similar 
pleasure, not in the lower sphere of his sensual nature only, 
but in the ideal regions of art, poetry, and religion ! For it 
is the privilege of his high and complex mental organisation 
to absorb and mentally transform the physical impulse and 
to expend its energy in ideal creations of the imagination — 
in spiritual generation. 

If the imagination has so important and essential a 
function in the development of mankind as I have indicated, 
the question may well be asked whether, after all, the 
understanding is the only mint from which truth issues ; 
whether in fact the imagination is not perhaps an organ of 
truths that are not truths of the understanding. Why 
should the last word be the thinker's ? Or why should he 
think that in any matter he has spoken the last word ? The 
understanding reveals a phenomenal world standing forth 
from a background of the unperceivable ; for assuredly 
beyond all forms or modes of man's apprehension there is 
that which has not undergone, and cannot undergo, form or 
mode in his consciousness. Indeed, is it not the fact that 
every definite idea, every class of notions that we form, 
every piece of positive knowledge that we gain, is an arbitrary 
limitation and separation, and therefore in some sort a falsi- 
fication ? To separate in thought the particular part from 
the whole with which it is in essential continuity of living 
being, as we do when we bring it under our conditions of 
perception and conception, is to make it a dead fragment 
rather than a living continuity, in so far as we know it. 
However positive, definite, and true then knowledge is in 
relation to us, as relative, there is nothing more superficial 
and artificial in relation to the universal and absolute. In 
this vague and vast region of unlimited and unrelational, 
which the very recognition of a relative and limited world 



204 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

of knowledge compels us to postulate, and which we may- 
please ourselves to talk of as 'the thing-in-itself' or the ab- 
solute, though both expressions are meaningless, 1 there is 
manifestly room enough for an unlimited play of the imagi- 
nation. Is it then perchance that in this function of 
imagination there beats the illuminating pulse of higher 
being than sense can apprehend? Perhaps it is that the 
infinite past thrills in us, making a tone of vague feeling 
that we cannot apprehend in thought or express in words, 
and giving us, as the connecting present between two 
eternities, the dim forefeeling of an endless continuity in 
the future ; that it is this formless thrill of unity with the 
whole and of continuity without end, to which no adequate 
reaction on our part is possible in thought or deed, which is 
the inspiration of imagination and the basis of morality and 
religion ; and that we have here a case in which doubt in- 
spired by the understanding overthrows beliefs to which a 
larger doubt of the range of the understanding brings us 
back under the authority of imagination. What truths of 
religion then, that are not truths of the understanding, may 
not imagination properly construct on the basis of this un- 
fathomable moral or religious consciousness ? 

Assuredly it may construct a great deal in that sphere, 
since its energy is inexhaustible, its exercise a pleasure, and 
it has ample scope enough ; but the real question is whether 
it is qualified to construct truly there, when it does so in 
defiance and even in direct contradiction of understanding. 
In the progressive becoming of knowledge imagination antici- 

1 Not to go back to what has been previously said about this matter, I may 
simply note here that, inasmuch as all meaning cannot be other than relative, 
the only absolute, if any, is that which we get in the relative, the only ' thing- 
in-itself ' that which we get in the phenomenon : that is to say, we know 
nothing of the absolute until it is no longer absolute, of the thing-in-itself 
until it is the thing-out-of -itself. Hardly less imbecile is the assertion that 
the absolute, though not a conception, is yet a state of consciousness. As if 
every state of consciousness were not just as relative as any conception. The 
vague feeling or dim notion that we think we have of the absolute is really 
the relative with as many of its relations as possible got rid of — the most 
general and abstract relative, in fact, that we can arrive at. Obviously any 
particular absolute, such as absolute truth, absolute good, must be a greater 
absurdity still. 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 205 

pates understanding, foretelling the immediate to be before 
it definitely is ; in the common use of it in scientific inquiry, 
for example, the theory which it constructs precedes the 
demonstration by which, after being tested and proved by 
the understanding, it is made knowledge ; and so it does 
actually go beyond the range of understanding, stretching 
forth into the future. But only from the basis of under- 
standing to come back to the test of understanding, if it is 
of sterling value. What sort of theory is that which is not 
based upon a competent appreciation of well observed facts 
and their relations? And what sort of imagination that 
which is not based upon good, well trained, and well informed 
understanding, and can in turn appeal to the test of it ? 

Those who think to find a source of revelation in 
imagination should consider that, constructing for us things 
that are not, and sometimes things that could not be con- 
sistently with the fundamental laws of mental evolution — 
for a truly based creation of the imagination, such as a 
character of Shakspeare's, is more true than the particular 
real, since it contains the essence of all the particular reals 
of that kind, as perceived by a man of genius, and by him 
embodied and exhibited to us in it — it has been the cause of 
most of our errors. They would not do amiss to reflect on 
the great multitude of false constructions that have been 
made by it since the beginning of its work upon earth, and 
to examine whether the plain effects of some of them have 
not been, as the larger use of them may be in the future, to 
promote not evolution but degeneration of the human kind. 
For it is not unlikely that natural selection will act to lead 
mankind downhill at the last to their extinction as effectively 
as it now acts to lead them uphill. However that be, these 
things we ought to make clear to ourselves in the matter — 
namely, what we can affirm positively, what we can deny 
positively, what we must be content to leave unaffirined and 
undenied: we are sure and can affirm that a fundamental 
impulse of evolution is felt in the higher functions of mind ; 
we are sure and can affirm that the impulse comes from afar 
and is more than personal in any proper sense of the word ; 
we are entirely in doubt what it is essentially, whence it 



206 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

comes, and whither it tends, and are sure that any positive 
and definite answers that we make to such questions must 
be fables of the imagination. 

Here we might properly take notice how much the 
operation of the imagination in defective and deranged 
states of the nervous system has had to do with the genera- 
tion and sustenance of supernatural beliefs and pretensions. 
Many erroneous beliefs of that character have their origin 
in a defective development of the understanding, such as is 
natural to savages and children. Witness, for example, the 
superstitions of ill omens which have so strong a hold on 
barbarous peoples, and indeed are not extinct in the most en- 
lightened countries. Two events occur near together, where- 
upon they are connected in the mind as cause and effect, 
though they have no causal relation whatever, their concur- 
rence or sequence being quite accidental. Causality being a 
form of thought under which we perceive events, it is the 
fundamental and universal apprehension of the understanding, 
and an easy error of it is that sequent events are conse- 
quent ; for mankind perceived causality long before they 
perceived true causes, and so hastened always to find causes 
where there were only coincidences, and to imaginatively 
invent them when there were none discernible. The search 
for causes, the instinctive need to find out some antecedent 
or connection for a phenomenon, I take to be the consequence 
of a deep practical intuition that we and all we see are 
related parts of an embracing whole, whereby we cannot 
bear to leave an event suspended in the void, as it were, 
but are driven always to endeavour to attach it somewhere. 
It would be impossible to estimate the number of erroneous 
inferences and beliefs and superstitions that have sprung 
from the operation of that instinct — from the glad and 
exuberant exercise of the imagination to supplement the 
defects of inadequate understanding. 

But besides these products of au imperfect basis of 
knowledge, a great many supernatural manifestations and 
revelations have been the manifest progeny of a brooding 
imagination operating from the unsound basis of a dis- 
ordered reason. A strange and grotesque progeny sometimes 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 207 

those products, but not without extraordinary influence on 
the events of human history. We may read there, if we 
•will, how hallucinations of hearing have been accepted as 
voices from heaven and hallucinations of vision as divine 
apparitions, and how whole sections of communities have 
been infected with a fanatical admiration and a devout 
worship of the delusions of a monomaniac. It is certainly a 
very remarkable thing, when we consider it well, that dis- 
orders of the nervous system have played so great a part 
in those beliefs which, being deemed to be of a spiritual 
order, are esteemed man's best possessions. What then shall 
we say ? Briefly no more than this at present — that some 
of these disordered ideas were the accidental concomitants 
of a genuine stream of tendency, incidental offsets of its 
progress, so to speak, and of little more essential signifi- 
cance than the foam in the steamer's track; and that 
others of them were the accompaniments of a process of 
degeneration that is going on constantly side by side with 
a process of evolution. Not all peoples survive and advance, 
nor all sections of a people, nor all families of a section, nor 
all individuals of a family ; it is only a chosen part, and 
that a small minority of the whole, which carries forward 
the progress of humanity; the huge majority is at best 
stationary and for the most part actually occupied in de- 
generating. In such case false beliefs, though accepted 
devoutly as of supernatural origin, are the expressions of a 
defect or degeneration which they in turn help to increase. 
The gods or other ideals which, a people of a barbarous and 
brutal nature creates for itself and worships, being in their 
characters the reflex of its character and development, 
become causes that contribute to perpetuate and increase 
the degradation of the people ; and among civilised people 
in like manner, both in the general and in the particular, 
the worship of false ideals is a powerful cause of degenera- 
tion. The language is in want of a convenient word to 
denote the opposite of a true ideal — a word such as anti- 
ideal — that might fitly express the aim of tendency which 
went opposite to, or was a positive deviation from, the path 
of progress of humanity in any direction. 



208 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

Enough, concerning a matter which, never yet treated 
systematically as its importance deserves, would require very 
detailed treatment to have justice done to it : suffice it here 
to say that however it be that supernatural revelation comes, 
whether from defective development or from derangement 
of understanding, this much is certain, that in no case can 
it come to us otherwise than through man and conditioned 
by the limitations of his nature ; he is the channel of its 
flow to us inevitably, whatever be the source, and therefore 
he may be, for anything we can tell, the perverter or the 
actual creator of the message. In this matter, as always, 
the direct testimony of the witness is liable to two serious 
fallacies — first, that he may be deceiving us, and, secondly, 
that he may be deceived himself ; and accordingly we cannot 
be sure we are not the victims of imposture or of hallucina- 
tion, or, as not seldom happens perhaps, of a mixture of both. 
For certainly the monomaniacal enthusiast is apt to advance 
through self-deception into more or less conscious imposture; 
his expanding course being commonly to be deceived himself, 
then to deceive himself, and in the end to deceive others. 

In this relation it is most necessary to bear distinctly in 
mind that forms and ceremonies, stereotyped propositions, 
articles of faith and dogmas of theology do not constitute the 
essence of religion but its vesture, and that, apart from all 
such forms and modes of interpretation, it responds to an 
eternal need of human sentiment. For it is inspired by the 
moral sentiments of humanity and rests on the deep founda- 
tions of sacrifice of self, devotion to the kind, the heroism of 
duty, pity for the poor and suffering, faith in the triumph of 
good. It appeals to, and is the outcome of, the heart not 
of the understanding, and so goes down into lower depths 
than the fathom-line of the understanding can sound; for the 
intellect is aristocratic and the heart democratic, knowledge 
puffing up but love uniting and building up, and the true 
social problem is to democratise the intellect through the 
heart. It is the deep fusing feeling of human solidarity, in 
whatsoever interpretative doctrines and ceremonies it may be 
organised for the time, that is religion in its truest sense ; 
for it is in the social organism what the heart is in the bodily 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 209 

organism, and when it ceases to beat in conscience, death and 
corruption ensue. The pity of religious formulas is that they 
so often carry men's thoughts away from the abiding and 
essential reality to an exaggerated appreciation of the passing 
forms and representations thereof. As his enemies put a 
false robe of royalty on Jesus when they led him to death, so 
have his followers since that time put a false robe of divinity 
on him, and so done much to lead religion to death. Those 
who criticise a particular religion, were they wise, would 
leave the sentiment untouched and do their work sympathe- 
tically, not in hostile antipathy. To pour indignation, scorn, 
ridicule, satire, and invective upon its extravagances and 
inconsistencies is not the whole method of criticism, nor 
indeed the best method in the end to accomplish the de- 
structive work aimed at. 

Another large reflection springs naturally here from the 
foregoing one — namely, the reflection that the great evolu- 
tional impulses that move society and effect great social revo- 
lutions do not spring from science or philosophy or know- 
ledge in any shape, but from obscure popular fermentation ; 
not from the clear understanding, which killeth, but from 
the troubled heart of mankind, which keepeth alive. It was 
not in the academy nor in the Lyceum, but in the manger of 
a stable, that Christianity was born, and its earliest adherents 
were illiterate and ignorant people gathered from the dregs 
of the populace. The masses of oppressed toilers for a bare 
sustenance, sunk in poverty and worn down with labour, 
what care they, or can they ever care, for the scientific dis- 
coveries that are the chief glory of the age ? If it takes a 
man all the labour of his life, doing nothing else, to know 
one special science, it is evident that the great majority of 
mankind can have but a very small portion in any science. 
Moreover, knowledge by itself is not necessarily good ; it is 
power certainly, but power for ill as much as for good. The 
result of its increase is to make the few who cultivate and 
possess it more powerful, and the many who do not 1 
powerful ; to raise those who are high and to degrade those 
who are low ; to make the rich richer and the poor poorer ; 
to increase inequality without yielding anything to fill the 



210 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

intervening gap. Now increase of inequality means in the 
end revolution and a new social fusion, in any people that 
has not fallen altogether out of the line of progress. Great 
social revolutions are the antecedents of new evolutions ; 
from the terrible fusion which they make of widely separated 
classes and interests there is the birth of new social forces ; 
they prevent the disintegration of humanity by preserving its 
solidarity. A fraternity based upon knowledge alone would 
want a consolidating cement and could not hold together. 
It is worthy of notice in this relation that the great mono- 
theistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism — have 
shown themselves hostile to science, moved thereto perhaps 
by a deep and just instinct; for they represent and bear 
witness to the prodigious labour and pains, the tears and toil 
and blood, that were needed and have been spent to bring 
man into complex social union; they may well therefore show 
an apprehension of social disruption and an instinctive re- 
pugnance to that which in any wise threatens so great a cala- 
mity. We are taught by the Jewish fable which has become 
the creed of Christendom that it was through an unwise am- 
bition of power that the angels fell, and through an unwise 
ambition of knowledge that man fell ; and these traditions 
betray the deep intuition that it is not on knowledge, which 
separates, nor on power, which tyrannises, but on sympathy 
of feeling, which unites, that society is founded and built up. 
Those who are enthusiasts enough to believe in the re- 
generation of society by the direct action of science, and 
who think it an unmixed good that the most earnest intellects 
of the day should be absorbed in working out some of the 
smallest details of a special science, would not do amiss 
perhaps to set to work to prove to the world that it is more 
moral to travel at the rate of fifty miles an hour behind a 
locomotive than at the rate of ten miles an hour in a stage- 
coach. One effect of the great modern progress in the in- 
dustries, arts, and various modes of material well-being has 
certainly been to generate many new desires of a selfish kind, 
the eager and incontinent gratification of which is corrupt- 
ing. Has it done much yet, or indeed anything, to compen- 
sate for these egoistic developments ? Nay, has it not rather 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 211 

weakened the great controlling force of religion which 
formerly kept egoism in check, without putting any altru- 
istic force in its place? l It would not be easy to prove that 
it is an advantage to accumulate riches if men decay, to 
wear fine clothes and to lose fine manners, to replace quiet 
country villages by miles upon miles of dreary town-suburbs. 
Are the people who inhabit these monotonous suburbs really 
nobler, better, happier than the more simple villagers whom 
they have displaced ? They read their daily newspapers as 
they travel rapidly by railway to gloomy offices of business, 
into which the direct light of day can hardly penetrate, and 
perhaps a journal of scandal or a sensational novel in the 
evening when they have returned from their monotonous 
labours to their dull domesticities ; but are they really better 
cultivated, or even so well cultivated morally, as their fore- 
fathers who walked on foot to their work, had no newspapers, 
and read no more books than the Bible and two or three 
others of a religious character? After all, an act of heroic 
self-sacrifice is a nobler thing, and more civilising, than to 
send a message instantly from London to Hongkong. 

It appears then at the best doubtful, when we consider 
the matter frankly, whether there is in the progress of 
scientific knowledge and of the arts, industries, and material 
comforts founded on it the promise of a real advance in true 
social development ; whether in fact knowledge is not in this 
respect pretty nigh impotent. The experience of the ancients 
would seem to indicate as much, who were certainly equal, 
if not superior, to us in architecture, in sculpture, in poetry, 
in eloquence, in philosophy, in literature, since they failed 

1 Any one who looks forward with a light heart to the overthrow of 
Christianity might do well to consider what can ever adequately replace it 
merely as a social and humanising force. Let him ponder seriously what its 
organisation means, and reflect what sort of organisation will be necessary to 
take the place of the Church which, standing in almost every village through- 
out the land, the visible token and the sacred home of man's highest aspira- 
tions, its pavements worn by the reverent tread of generations that now rest 
in hallowed ground around it, solemnly initiates the individual into the social 
union, calls him to regular acknowledgment of his social duties, admonishes 
him of the vanity of life and of the eternal consequences of the deeds dono la 
it, sanctions with its blessings his nuptial unions, and speaks solemn words of 
comfort and hope at the hour of death. 



212 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

to develope out of these the forces of a higher social evolu- 
tion. For what happened? With all the intellectual acqui- 
sitions of Rome coming on the top of those of Greece 
society went steadily towards destruction, and all that 
philosophy could do was to proclaim and lament it. Then 
was born of low parentage in a most mean way in a dis- 
tant corner of the empire a person who passed in entire 
obscurity thirty years of a life which ended at thirty-three 
years. For the three remaining years that he appeared in 
public he was scouted as a miserable impostor, rejected by 
the priests and rulers of his own nation, hardly thought 
worthy a few words of contemptuous mention by the 
historians of the day, followed only by a few of the lowest 
persons of the lowest classes of society. At the end of his 
brief public career he died an ignominious death on the 
cross, betrayed by one of his own disciples, denied by 
another, abandoned by all. 1 And yet in him was the birth of 
the greatest social force which, so far as we know, has ever 
arisen to modify human evolution. To have predicted it 
beforehand, nay, even so much as to have formed the dimnest 
anticipation of its coming and nature, would have been 
as impossible to all the intellectual insight of the time as it 
would have been impossible to predict, before experience, 
the organic molecules which carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, 
and oxygen are capable of forming. The momentous fact 
may well abate the pretensions of philosophy to forecast the 
future of humanity : suffice it to know that if it is to progress, 
it will, as heretofore, draw from a source within itself, deeper 
than knowledge, the inspiration to direct and urge it on the 
path of its destiny. 

Continuing the inquiry into the foundations of wide- 
spread traditional beliefs which are not derived from obser- 
vation and reasoning, since some of them blankly contradict 
observation and reasoning, let us consider the doctrine of a 
personal immortality. It was a natural product of primitive 
imagination ; so much so, considering how imagination 
works, that it would have been a wonder if it had not been 

1 Enfin il meurt d'une mort honteuse, trahi par un des siens, reni6 par 
un autre, et abandonnS de tous. — Pascal. 



CEKTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 213 

constructed by it out of observation, and is perhaps a wonder 
that the belief is not universal. Nothing perishes absolutely 
in the universe; matter is neither created nor destroyed; it 
is in a continual flux of becoming and unbecoming, dis- 
appearing in one mode to reappear in another ; there is no 
death in the sense of annihilation. Here then may have 
been the foundation of a vague notion that man will not all 
die. His body might return to the dust of which it was 
compounded, going through a corruption in the process that 
was well fitted to stir an active repulsion to the notion of 
death, but it was not easy to believe that all his high aspira- 
tions, warm affections, noble sentiments, lofty thoughts, 
should lose their individuality and vanish into nothingness 
with the loss of the bodily individuality. For although time 
was when they were not, the difficulty is much greater to 
conceive them not being after his death than it is to conceive 
them not being before he was born. 

It will be objected perhaps that a vague observation of 
the indestructibility of matter, if made — and assuredly it 
was made — could never suffice to found a belief of personal 
immortality in face of the positive experience that all living 
things die and undergo decomposition, going down to the 
earth and returning not from it. Bear in mind, however, in 
relation to this objection, that many living things seem to 
die, and were thought to die, and yet do not die, but put on 
life again after a season of death-like repose. Of the seed 
put into the ground, which he ignorantly calls dead, the 
Apostle Paul, addressing his imagined opponent in his usual 
energetic fashion, says, ' Thou fool, that which thou sowest 
is not quickened except it die : ' an observation incontestably 
adequate to generate the notion of a resurrection, seeing 
that the Apostle actually bases upon it his argument of the 
certainty of a bodily resurrection. It has been a common 
comparison of the race of man on earth to leaves on trees, 
now green in youth, now withering on the ground : what 
more obvious and natural than to see in the periodically 
awakened life of recurring springs the probability of a 
human resurrection to life after a period of apparent death? 
True it may be that the comparison ought rightly to be 



214 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

contrast: that, as the Greek poet wails mournfully, although 
the mallow and the green parsley and the full- thriving anise 
come to life again and blossom afresh in the next summer, 
we, whether great or strong or wise men, once we are buried 
in the earth, sleep a long, long eternal sleep, from which 
there is no awaking ; but if it be so, it is still certain that 
the natural tendency and desire would be, as I have pointed 
out, to figure things otherwise. 

Is it alleged that these kinds of analogies are too subtile 
to have ever been perceived by the rude mind of a savage 
who yet has some dim notion of a life after his body's death ? 
Be it so : it will hardly be denied then that the vivid appari- 
tion of a dead person in dreams would be enough to suggest 
to the lowest savage, nay to compel him to the belief of, the 
persistence of some sort of shadowy life after bodily death. 
At a very early stage of human development such apparitions 
of the dead, in their forms and habits as they lived, could not 
fail to produce a conviction that although their bodies had 
perished, the forms or phantoms of them survived, lingering 
disconsolate in the neighbourhood of their old habitations 
and interests. And that is very much the savage's vague 
notion of a soul, if he has any notion at all; an image rather 
than an idea, something more thin, faint and fine, less tangible, 
than the body ; a shadowy apparition of the pale, wan form 
of the dead person, which was probably supposed also to 
leave the body during sleep and to return to it at awaking. 
Naturally too he believed that his dogs and horses had simi- 
lar souls ; for which reason it was right to bury them with the 
dead chief, along with his bow and arrows and the slaves 
perhaps who were killed to attend upon him, in order that 
his ghost might be fitly furnished and attended in his new 
sphere of existence. It is impossible seriously to compare 
this kind of notion of spiritual life with the modern notion 
of soul, or rightly to call it by the same name, so little have 
they in common; it is only comparable with the vulgar 
notion of a ghost that prevailed generally at one time, and 
still prevails among the ignorant, in civilised countries, or 
with the spirit-forms that are evoked and exhibited at so- 
called spiritual seances. To discover the notions of soul and 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 215 

God in the mind of a low savage is very much like an 
ingenious discovery of the steam-hammer in the stone which 
the monkey uses to crack a nut. 

It is not in dreams only, however, that a vision of the 
dead may be seen, for a waking person shall see sometimes 
a similar apparition ; and it is a long time before a people 
reaches that height of critical culture which enables it to 
know that the ghost so seen is a trick of the nerves, a hal- 
lucination of sense. Now in respect of such a vision it is 
plain that a savage would be under a twofold inevitable 
drawback : in the first place, he could not have the least sus- 
picion that what he saw was a coinage of his brain, not an 
objective reality, and must therefore theorise about it as a 
real thing of its kind, though not of his kind : in the second 
place, in his undeveloped mind with its few and child-like 
ideas of the concrete and their few and simple associations ; 
with that tremulous fear too of the unknown common to him 
with children ; and with the activity of an imagination 
unballasted by reason, and prone, as in children, as in dream- 
ing and in madness, to make the concrete notion a reality ; — 
the vivid idea of the spirit or ghost of a dead man would 
far more easily dominate waking sense and so give rise to 
hallucination, than it would in a mind amply stored with 
abstract notions of the relations of the concrete, and in other 
respects fully developed. Thus he is at the same time more 
susceptible to hallucinations and less capable of correcting 
them. If he cannot distrust the vivid apparition of a dream, 
how can he distrust the vivid and more startling apparition 
of waking life ? We may feel the less averse to accept this 
theory of the origin of a belief in ghost-like apparitions of 
the dead among savages, if we consider well how large a part 
beliefs in invisible spirits that sometimes become visible 
have had in the beliefs of civilised nations, and how much the 
hallucinations of fanatical enthusiasm have helped in the 
propagation of religious creeds. 

Another important fact which we ought clearly to appre- 
hend and fully to comprehend : that although t he man dies 
humanity does not die, the death of the individual being a 
necessary event of the life of the race. He, though dead, is 



216 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

still a part of living humanity, a coefficient in its movements, 
in so far as what he has done contributes to its weal or to 
its woe : in the influence which he has exerted through his 
deeds and through the children whom he has perhaps brought 
into being, the good or ill that he has done lives after him. 
The deadest of deaths is never a complete death. As he 
cannot stand alone in life, separate and self-sufficing, but as 
one in a company, a unit of society, must needs give and 
take, becoming debtor and creditor before he is aware of it, 
so death does not isolate and end him ; for as none liveth to 
himself so none dieth to himself, and those who follow him 
suffer or gain inevitably by what he has done to help or to 
hinder the progress of his kind. Those especially with 
whom he has lived in intimate intercourse, who have been 
witnesses of his struggles and shared in his interests, who 
have sympathised with him in his failures and rejoiced with 
him in his successes, in whose thoughts and feelings he has 
filled a large place and of whose being he has been a great 
part, cannot be entirely rid of him when he dies ; for he has 
entered as an element into their mental nature and habits, 
and he lives on there after his death, it may be in a con- 
tinuing and even multiplying increase from generation to 
generation. Is it not soberly true of a great benefactor of 
mankind that he has a larger and fuller human life after 
death than he had when he actually lived? Putting off 
mortality he puts on immortality. If then your dead 
mother, or sister, or lover, or child has such a continuing life 
in you, it may well be for you a hard and repugnant, perhaps 
an impossible, thing to conceive him or her as having under- 
gone the death of annihilation. For how can he be annihi- 
lated who, being a part of your happiest memories, is still 
living in you ? He is not annihilated for you until you are 
annihilated ; and indeed not then so long as your influence 
lives on in those who come after you. Naturally it is a much 
easier matter, indeed a matter nowise difficult, for you to 
suppose that a rickety Chinese baby which drew only a 
few gasps of breath some three thousand years ago is not 
now enjoying eternal life, or to imagine the eternal death of 
a Choctaw Indian's worn-out squaw who died a thousand 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 217 

years before Columbus discovered America. It is not here 
alleged, be it understood, that the belief in a personal im- 
mortality sprang from a clear conception of this continuing 
life in others : all that is supposed is that the strong instinct 
thereof which experience could not fail to infix would stimu- 
late the imagination to clothe it in some ideal form. Rather 
would it seem that the clear conception belongs to the 
future, being that into which the prevailing belief of a 
spiritual individuality after death is likely with the advance 
of knowledge to merge : a life in very truth spiritual since 
it is in the spirits of them that bear witness to it that it 
lives. 

Lastly, consider this : that when the drama of life ends 
prematurely by a tragical close — that is, when the individual 
is cut off suddenly in the budding spring or full summer of 
his energy, before his desire to do and be is waning or 
extinct, there is an earnest longing to do more, a fearful 
aversion to realise that it is the end, an instinctive craving 
for the continuance of a life not yet fully spent, which trans- 
lates itself easily into the belief of a life to come. Hence it 
is that the desire and belief of a future life are stronger 
and more manifest in those who die young or in middle age, 
especially if from accident or from sudden disease, than in 
old persons who die of wasting disease or by the slow process 
of natural decay ; for in these the waning of vital energy is 
the waning of the desire to live ; and though they may hold 
to and repeat the formulas of their creed, they do it in a 
quiet, formal, automatic way, very much as they continue 
methodically the habits of their lives or perform their 
customary slow and measured movements. Worn out at last 
by the infirmities of age, the one thing they heartily desire 
is freedom from disturbance — rest. Not only by the indi- 
vidual who perishes timelessly, but by those near and dear 
to him, is the natural unwillingness felt to believe that so 
premature an end can be the end; for when death has 
snatched suddenly away one who had just begun to love and 
be loved, whose wisdom was but half blossomed, his work 
not yet half done, it seems to them impossible to acknow- 
ledge that he was created only for such an abortive result ; 
IS 



218 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

they are constrained to hope that the fair promise of de- 
velopment, blasted here, will have fulfilment elsewhere. 

Is the longing for immortality then essentially the sub- 
lime utterance of human egoism, and the expression of it 
perhaps the statement in terms of extension — that is, as 
eternal, of the intensity of the feeling of life-love which is 
not otherwise adequately expressible ? 'Tis much, in fact, as, 
according to Coleridge's apt remark, two ardent lovers try 
to express the intensity of their love by describing themselves 
as ' Yours for ever. 9 How indeed can the sense of being feel, 
or the notion of being adequately conceive, the sense or 
notion of not-being'? From the subjective basis alone it 
would seem impossible that I, being, can conceive myself as 
not being ; to do so would be to be and not to be at the same 
moment; wherefore from that standpoint the intensity of 
the feeling of life becomes naturally the extensive hope or 
belief of an eternal life after a seeming death. But the 
matter has quite another look when one has recourse to 
objective observation; for there is no great difficulty, as I 
have said before, in conceiving the eternal death of a baby 
that lived only a few minutes in an Indian wigwam ten 
thousand years ago. In like manner one may attend in 
imagination at the destruction of one's own body as it 
undergoes corruption in the grave, organ after organ in due 
course according to the tenacity of its structure, until it 
mixes indistinguishably with the surrounding soil. Is it 
then that a subjective illusion of ever-being requires, like 
other subjective feelings, to be corrected by objective obser- 
vation? The true measure of time is not the feeling of 
duration but the watch, the true measure of temperature 
the thermometer. Here again may we take instructive 
note what good reason theology has for its instinctive anta- 
gonism to science and for its inseverable adhesion to meta- 
physics. 

Is it true, as we are taught, that we have the instinct we 
are strangers and sojourners here, and belong permanently to 
another kingdom than the passing kingdom of this world ? 
It is not true that the instinct is universal, but it is certainly 
true that we have here no abiding place, and that we and 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 219 

the changing fashions of this world shall pass away. How 
can it be otherwise, since this world being the world that 
each one's senses fashion for him must be as transient as 
they are? It is the internal synthesis which he makes of 
the infinitesimally small fraction of the whole to the mole- 
cular vibrations of which he is sensible. When the functions 
of sense cease at death, and the mental organisation that 
they have built up undergoes dissolution with the rest of the 
bodily parts, these become again a part of the whole out of 
which it came into temporary being, entering into and re- 
suming their rights in those cosmical operations whose range 
is outside the sense-built world of human experience. From 
the standpoint of the individual the world was not before 
he was and will not be after he is not. 

This we may say at the end of these reflections concerning 
the natural modes of origin of a belief of personal immortality 
— and there is perhaps little more to be said — that the various 
imaginative constructions which different systems of religion 
have built up respectively to give the mind the stay and satis- 
faction of positive conceptions in that wherein its nature and 
the nature of things deny them, useful and essential as they 
have been in the process of human development, may not on 
that account have any more basis in the fully developed in- 
tellectual life of mankind than an embryonic organ of the 
body, the functions of which cease soon after birth, has in 
the bodily life of the adult individual. When men do not 
know the truth they do well to agree in common error 
based upon common feeling, for thereby their energies are 
fixed in the unity of definite aim and not dissipated to waste 
in restless and incoherent vagaries. No doubt the provi- 
sional belief may be in many respects harmful, as the belief 
in immortality would certainly seem to have been; for it has 
been the direct cause of numberless sacrifices of animals, of 
slaves, of women, on the tombs of men ; the occasion of a 
complete machinery of extortions by priests to have masses 
said for the souls of the dead, or to obtain their inteiv 
sions; has too often dimmed the hope and weighed down the 
energy of this life by the overhanging dread of an eternity 
of suffering; has lessened generally the sense of the valuo 



220 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

and weakened the conscience of human life on earth, by pre- 
cluding the just feeling of present responsibility for the end- 
less consequences of every act done in it; and has entailed 
several other ills that might be mentioned. But these ills 
may be deemed the compensating offsets of a preponderating 
good, so long as the belief has genuine vitality. To idealise 
the real, and thereafter to present the ideal in concrete 
notion or sensible form and to pretend it is the real — 
that is the law of the nisus of man's mental evolution, the 
pleasing means by which he is duped into development. 

Passing from these reflections, though they might easily 
be continued to a much greater length, I now advert briefly 
to two more religious beliefs that are of transcendent mag- 
nitude. The first is that of the Atonement. How came it 
to pass that men ever conceived naturally the notion of the 
redemption of the whole human race by the sacrifice of one 
person through a painful and ignominious death ? Develop- 
ment they could perceive plainly in nature, and degeneration 
they could perceive ; but how conceive the notion that a great 
vicarious sacrifice of God incarnate as man was required and 
made in order that God might fulfil His purpose of increasing 
development and lessening degeneration? It will be said, 
perhaps, that the stupendous strangeness and uniqueness of 
the conception were the natural consequence of the fact that 
it did not and could not come naturally, but did come super- 
naturally ; that its natural improbability was just what 
might be expected from its natural impossibility. Is the 
notion then so extraordinary, so independent, and so unre- 
lated, so entirely a thing-of-itself, that it must have come 
by special message from supernatural sources to a select 
fraction of the human race? or may it not have come as the 
culminating development of other notions of the same kind, 
but of lesser magnitude, that have prevailed in divers forms 
among all fractions of the race ? There cannot be a doubt 
that the rite of sacrifice by which guilt was expiated or bless- 
ings gained was one of the most remarkable and constant 
observances of different religions; and it is not therefore any 
violation of probability, nor any violence of legitimate scien- 
tific inference, to suppose that the supreme sacrifice of the 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 221 

only Son of God was the grand climax of this notion of 
vicarious atonement. For naturally in such sacrifices it was 
best that the victim should be as rare and spotless as possible, 
the value and efficacy of the sacrifice increasing with the 
purity and rarity of the thing offered. Now certainly there 
could not be a more rare, more pure, more costly sacrifice 
than that of the only -begotten and well-beloved Son of God. 
Abraham's designed sacrifice of his son Isaac, Jephthah's 
sacrifice of his daughter, Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, 
and the like instances : what more probable stepping 
stones to the stupendous notion of that supreme vicarious 
sacrifice for the whole human race? Plainly evolution in 
that direction has come to an end now ; it has reached a 
matchless height in the climax of the conception of sacrifice, 
and cannot ever go a step further ; and any change in time 
to come must be the undoing change of dissolution. 

It is not perhaps hard to understand how the notion of 
vicarious sacrifice, once it had come to be, reached its 
supreme evolution. But what is not so evident is how the 
original idea came into being. Most likely from the wish to 
placate by suitable offerings — the more costly and precious 
the more acceptable — the terrible gods and other mysterious 
powers with which primitive imagination peopled nature, 
and in particular the special guardian spirit or God of the 
family, the city, the tribe. Man approached his gods as 
he would have approached an earthly tyrant whose favour 
he desired to win or whose anger he hoped to propitiate, 
by humbly presenting to them offerings of that which 
was most precious to him, or what custom ordained as by 
them most esteemed. If he had not or could not obtain that 
which he desired to offer, as being too costly or not in the 
nature of things procurable, he substituted in lieu of it some 
other offering to please the propitious or to appease the 
incensed Deity. 

This fact also we ought to apprehend and consider well 
— that vicarious sacrifice is implicit in the constitution 
society; the very structure of which is based upon the 
principle that we suffer for one another's sins, bear one 
another's burdens, expiate one another's errors, profit bj 



222 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

one another's gains, gain by one another's pains. 1 It is an 
immanent law of the constitution and development of the 
social organism, and very manifest in its elemental factor or 
unit — the family : the solidarity of mankind in social union 
the basis of it. Children suffer the bitter pains of their 
parents' wrong-doings, who themselves go through many 
labours and sorrows in order that their children may have 
joy and gladness; the wife is the innocent victim of her 
husband's sins and reaps the fruits of his painful toils, as 
he in turn suffers the penalty of her failings and profits by 
her virtues — each benefiting by the pains and gains of the 
other ; the idle, reckless and improvident live on the fruits 
of the labour of the industrious, prudent and provident ; the 
greatest benefactors of mankind have often been the greatest 
sufferers at its hands — have died some of them publicly as 
known, many of them in obscurity as unknown, martyrs of 
humanity. Without doubt all guilt is avenged upon earth, 
but never wholly, and sometimes hardly at all, upon the 
individual sinner. Everywhere the same story meets us : 
that vicarious atonement and vicarious recompense are 
essential principles of social union. To forgive one's 
enemies and to do good to them that use us ill should not 
be, as it commonly is, the hardest task of Christian humility, 
or the highest reach of philosophic indifference, but the easy 
and natural result of a just and adequate view of one's social 
debtor and creditor relations. If now this principle of 
vicarious suffering was implicit in the earliest social de- 
velopment, and the necessary condition of that development, 
is it any wonder that some faint and vague adumbration of 
it, some dim intuition of its meaning, should have been re- 
vealed to the minds of the early leaders in the social move- 
ment, and inspired and initiated those rites of sacrifice that 
have been such marked features in many religions ? To say 
that a divinely endowed being was sent into the world to 
make atonement for mankind by suffering the penalty of its 
sins, and so to redeem it from a fate of unending misery, is 
to say that nature developed the means by which nature was 
made better: in other words, the organism of humanity, 
having reached a certain stage of evolution, gave birth to a 
1 See Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent. 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 223 

supremely endowed organ by the functions of which its 
future development was determined ill the right direction — in 
the direction, that is to say, of that moral which is true social 
progress. The supreme atonement was the personification 
and glorification of the social principle of vicarious sacrifice. 
That is seen to be the true meaning of it when we look 
sincerely at facts, and do not leave the solid ground of their 
relations to busy and beguile ourselves with discussions in 
the air concerning a unique, entirely detached, and trans- 
cendently mysterious event. 

The other widespread religious, or rather theological, 
belief to which I advert briefly is that of a personal God. 
In the order of development the belief in many gods pre- 
ceded the belief in one God. Ignorant and comparatively 
helpless as primeval man was, as he stumbled blindly along 
in his career, awestruck with vague and vast terror of the 
encompassing unknown in relation to which he could not 
make definite adjustments of conduct nor frame distinct 
apprehensions of feeling and thought, his imagination gave 
anthropomorphic personifications to the vast and mysterious 
powers whose laws of action he did not in the least under- 
stand. Knowing nothing of forces that overwhelmed him, 
and yet obliged every moment to act in relation to them, he 
was continually offending against them and suffering for his 
offences. The aspect therefore in which they were presented 
to him was that of angry and terrible powers, evil-inflicting, 
hidden, all-powerful, before which he prostrated himself in 
abject fear and abasement, eager to appease their wrath and 
to win their favour by supplications and sacrifices. All 
which was natural enough : how could he account for their 
mysterious and seemingly malignant workings, how represent 
them to his intelligence, except by imagining, from the basis 
of his own experience, hidden beings who acted from like 
vengeful motives to those which actuated him and his fellows, 
only with vastly greater power? The generalisation war- 
ranted by his observation and experience, so far as he could 
make it, would be the generalisation of almighty malignity. 

It was no less natural that fear abated as knowledge grew 
by slow and minute increments through the ages, as more 
and more the discovery was made of natural laws uniform 



224 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

in their operations, and as more and more clearly lie perceived 
lie could by conforming to those laws turn them to his profit, 
gaining victory after victory through obedience ; that god 
after god receded further and further into the background, 
waning in power and consideration as new provinces of know- 
ledge were conquered successively, and finally expired ; that 
the personal action of those gods which were left became more 
and more remote, obscure, and indirect ; and that at last he 
was brought to the recognition of one God, Maker of heaven 
and earth, who ordained and governed all things by laws 
which were the manifestations of His will. The necessities 
of thought compelled him to posit somewhere at the back 
of known causation, at the beginning, that is to say, 
of the series of causes upon causes which he could trace 
backwards in endless regress, a self-existing cause — God, 
substance, nature — to which no antecedent cause was con- 
ceivable. Now this great conception of one God absorbing 
into Himself all other gods, and leaving them no continuity 
of being but in Him, is plainly the last term, 'the consum- 
mate flower,' of god- fashioning evolution ; there can be no 
farther progress henceforth in that direction ; a final con- 
ception has been reached beyond which it is impossible for 
human thought to go. 

Always has it been necessary for man to make for him- 
self some sort of mental synthesis of the world around him 
in order to live in it. He must bind phenomena into a unity 
of 'some kind; otherwise he would be the play of scattered 
and unconnected impressions succeeding one another with- 
out any tie, would have no sense of continuity, and could not 
so much as look out on it intelligently or act methodically 
in relation to it : moral and intellectual development would 
be impossible. The unifying impulse is indeed instinct in 
living matter both in its conscious and its unconscious rela- 
tions : it is the base of the so-called principle of individuation 
which has been defined as the essential characteristic of life. 
For the body is a synthesis, each organ of it a synthesis, 
each element of each organ a synthesis : organic life is kept up 
by the maintenance and organic growth by the increase of a 
synthesis. Life in mind in like manner is not possible save 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 225 

by virtue of a unifying impulse that is itself the necessary 
expression of bodily unity or synthesis. How then must it 
necessarily manifest itself in relation to external nature at 
a time when, ignorance of matter and its properties and 
relations being almost complete, no approach to a scientific 
synthesis was possible? By the imaginative construction 
of agents dwelling and working in nature — that is to say, 
by the fabrication of demons and deities ; to be followed at 
a later period of the advance of knowledge, when demoi.^ 
and deities fell into discredit, by the creation of meta- 
physical entities dwelling in things, which took upon them 
the functions of the extinct gods. Always, however, is syn- 
thesis of feeling deeper than intellectual synthesis : a man 
may have no very definite and consistent theory in the 
conduct of his life, but none the less will his mental con- 
struction of the world follow consistently an unconscious 
synthesis springing from feeling and character; so likewise 
in primitive man the synthesis of feeling was prior to that 
of thought, and inspired his grotesquely imaginative inter- 
pretations of nature, as it inspires now the particular mental 
theory of the world which each individual constructs for 
himself. Consider the matter well, without flinching from 
the logical issues of reflection, and is it not the fact that the 
unity of a science, which so much delights its pursuers now; 
that each scientific synthesis in it which the pleased and 
patient worker contributes to build up the whole ; that the 
grand conception of the unity of all science, which kindles 
flaming outbursts of philosophic rapture ; are just as much 
subjective creations on our part, mere modes of our know- 
ledge, as ever were demons and deities, and for aught we 
know may have little more valid foundation in objective 
reality ? 

The idea of God, as giving unity to the universe, or of 
self-subsisting Substance — Sinatura naturans — which is tacitly 
endowed with the attributes of God, is a necessity of thought 
imposed upon man by the limitations of his faculties — by 
the impossibility under which he, as an individual, lit s of 
thinking and interpreting the universe save in terms of 
himself. Unavoidably and unwarrantably he limits the 



226 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

unknown power which he calls God, when he honestly tries 
to make the conception of it, though he starts in instant 
affright from the limitation which he suspects he is making, 
when he catches a glimpse of it ; and by inventing words that 
negate definite meanings, in order to conceal or deny it, he 
pleases himself to think that he has got rid of it in thought. 
To attempt to comprehend or even to name the inscrutable 
is the grossest absurdity : the incomprehensible must remain 
ineffable. Nevertheless he may be permitted to believe 
that energy from the region outside knowledge works in 
and by him, giving impulses and aspirations which he can- 
not otherwise account for ; he may feel the energy without 
being able to fathom its source, as a man would feel the 
moon in the tides, though he were blind and never saw it ; 
and he may declare his impotence of thought by such ex- 
pressions as from everlasting to everlasting, infinite, absolute, 
and the like. But to bring God at all within the compass 
of human predication, and above all to give to Him a magni- 
fied human personality, a character and a name, asserting 
thereupon that man is made in His image, is sheer 
blasphemy and nonsense. The Jehovah of the Jew was as 
purely tribal a God as any god of the Canaanites over whom 
He exulted; as plain a creation of the Jewish mind and 
character as the idols of the Chinese are national creations, 
which they are said to make with big bellies because the 
ruling functionaries are usually corpulent in that respect. 
Nor in any other case can assertions made concerning God 
fail to do more than reflect the stages of human culture at 
which they are made ; even to declare His ways to be what we 
call moral is just as absurd as to declare Him to be jealous, 
angry, revengeful, or to have back parts. 1 The most exalted 
idea that can be formed is still anthropomorphic, being 
nothing else than the most abstract ideal of humanity con- 

' * The man who does to others as he would have others do unto him, is 
moral ; but it is a morality from a strictly human standpoint. What might 
the animal which he pursues, enslaves, tortures, kills, eats for his gratifica- 
tion, think of that morality from its standpoint ? Or, how may such 
morality look from the standpoint of the universe as a whole 1 Let us join 
hands and help one another, for we are the glory of the universe, if not its end 
and aim, and nothing else has any value in it in comparison with us ! 






CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 227 

ceivable with as many relations as possible got rid of— in 
fact with certain attached words that are actually negations 
of conceptions, but which are tacitly treated as meaning 
realities. 

These we may set down as the two supreme absurdities : 
first, the assertion that there is nothing beyond human 
experience that is not in accordance with human experi- 
ence, nothing beyond the actual or possible reach of human 
faculties; and, secondly, the pretence to any sort of know- 
ledge of that beyond or the enunciation of any proposition 
whatever, positive or negative, concerning it. Every one 
has justly the right to rebel alike against the dogmatism 
of sense-built science when it goes beyond its range to deny 
supra-sensual possibilities, and against the dogmatism of the 
theologian who imposes his fantastic notions of the supra- 
sensual as matters of faith. 

It is certain that the conception of God at the present 
day, as a God of love to the whole human race, is very 
different from the Jewish conception of God, this having 
undergone a remarkable evolution in Christian thought. 
Faith has created the pattern that love desires ; and the 
jealous and special God of the Jews, nominally worshipped 
still, is really banished to the limbo where other dead gods, 
like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and the rest of them, have 
gone. 

The tendency moreover is day by day more and more to 
abandon predications concerning God and to make the con- 
ception more and more abstract, vague, remote, undefined, 
nebulous. How in any way define, that is mark out from 
all else, when there is no else ? An eminent Unitarian 
preacher and writer, after congratulating himself on the 
dissolution or fading away of what he calls ( scenic dreams ' 
of the Christ-drama, says that ' the more the Divine life 
awakes in us the less do we ask, and the less can we bear, 
that its infinite objects and elements shall be rendered 
finite by being brought into the plane of Perception.' ! He 
would have a vague and vast feeling of transcendental 
possession, not to be apprehended in thought nor uttered in 

1 Rev. Dr. Martineau. 



228 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

words, such as he might get, I take it, without any divine 
contemplation at all, from a dose of opium 5 or such as a 
hysterical girl who falls into an ecstasy has engendered 
by the practice of self-abandonment to unwisely indulged 
feeling. For he omits to inquire into the source, which 
may be the lowest bodily, and into the value, which may 
be personal and illusive, of this vaguely rapturous feeling by 
which he aspires to be possessed and thrilled ; and he would 
do well perhaps, first, to assure himself that the afflatus is 
from above and not from below, and 'then to prove that in 
any case it is a wholesome and efficacious substitute for the 
concrete Divinity which he has denuded Christ of. It may 
be doubted whether by taking the God out of Christ, and 
then getting up an ecstasy of vapid sentiment about a 
Divinity from which man has been eliminated, there is scope 
left for sound and manly feeliug ; for with emotion as with 
thought the true test of practical value is perhaps to be 
sought in the concrete. Otherwise one may arrive at a mood 
of mind in which shall be found much comfort and no shock 
to reason in a prayer of this kind : — Thou, who wast before 
every before, and wilt be after every after; most hidden, 
yet most present; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never 
new, never old ; ever working, ever at rest ; still gathering, 
yet nothing lacking; who lovest without passion; art 
jealous without anxiety; repentest, yet grievest not; art 
angry, yet serene ; J — and so forth through an assortment of 
blank contradictories that are revealed to the divine intui- 
tion of ecstatic feeling as blended in mystical union in a 
higher plane of being than thought can reach or aspire to. 

Some there are who will be disposed to contend for some- 
thing of a human character in the divine consciousness on 
the ground that in its contents are the infinite multitudes of 
separate human consciousnesses : the grand harmonic whole 
must be conscious because it embraces the multitudinous 
undulations that are conscious. In respect of that argument 
it must be borne in mind that the sum of any number of 
limitations, such as all individual consciousnesses being rela- 
tive are, never could make the unlimited. Let them all be 

1 Most of these expressions are taken from St. Augustine's Confessions. 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 229 

included, the resultant is still limited, and that which is still 
excluded is the infinite; of which to predicate the same 
kind of consciousness is nonsense. We are thus brought to 
the dilemma either to make divine consciousness co-extensive 
only with a small part of the universe, namely, that which 
is humanly conscious, or to extend human consciousness to 
the whole, when it could obviously be no longer human. In 
the case of such extension, indeed, consciousness would dis- 
appear; becoming the whole, it would lose that limitation 
by virtue of which it is; for it arises from the opposition 
between subject and object, the ego and the non-ego, and the 
resulting changes of state, and is always most acute in those 
intensely subjective states of pain, mental or bodily, when 
the individual is most limited, the full expression of his 
nature most impeded or repressed, and he therefore least in 
harmony with the whole. The act of transcending human 
limitations, were it possible, and of becoming universal and 
unchangeable would be its self-annihilation. A supreme, 
absolute, and infinite consciousness could not be, or could be 
only as an eternal unconscious intuition, were that conceiv- 
able humanly. The generalisation of a divine consciousness 
is not more valid than would be the generalisation of a divine 
big toe ; for, indeed, to suppose a universal consciousness 
answering in any way to the sum of human consciousnesses 
is as much a piece of anthropomorphism, though not quite 
so gross and palpable an instance, as to represent God in the 
exact image of the creature man. 

It is another pretty piece of anthropomorphism — hardly 
less so than to make God moral — to infer from our observa- 
tion of nature that He is working out some great purpose in 
the remote future through multitudinous adaptations, direct 
and circuitous, simple and complicated, of means to ends : 
for how can that which is purpose or end, according to the 
fashion of human intelligence, be purpose or end to an 
unconditioned and infinite intelligence? Design in nature is 
no more than design inhuman nature; and the legitimate 
conclusion of man from his discovery of it is not as to the 
attested existence of a divine designer, but as to the clever 
deception by which he, the real designer, has projected the 



230 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

shadow of his self-experience and transformed it into an 
outside divine worker, of his own complexion. But see his 
inconsistency the while ! In the same breath with which he 
pronounces the divine end to be past finding out, incompre- 
hensible, inconceivable by human intelligence, he declares 
and insists on the existence of final purpose in nature, both 
in the particular and in the general. He postulates an end, 
which, being a term that derives its sole meaning from and 
is solely applicable to human conceptions, is simply mean- 
ingless, pure nonsense, when applied, or misapplied, to what 
transcends human conceptions. 

But it is his way, in magnitudes that outstretch his 
conceptions, habitually to use meaningless or self-contra- 
dictory terms. What more common in his mouth, for ex- 
ample, than such expressions as infinite number, infinite 
multitude, and the like, when number is number by virtue 
only of being definite, and infinite number therefore is 
number which is not number ! His manner of reasoning 
of the final causes of nature from his standpoint is very 
much as if an oyster were to construct a theory of human 
doings in London or Paris from the basis of its limited 
relations with the interior of its shell ; or as if the little 
worm that feeds on the leaves of old books were to con- 
struct a theory of their purpose from its experience of their 
uses for its food. Now it may justly be doubted whether the 
lucubrations of an oyster, however exceptionally well inspired 
with the divine afflatus of prophecy, or the intuitions of a 
book- worm, though never so much experienced among books, 
would rise to the least apprehension of human doings or of 
human uses of books. In which connection it is well also to 
bear in mind that the vast but still measurable distance by 
which human perception outreaches the oyster's perception 
is very little, compared with the immeasurable distance by 
which human perception is transcended by that which lies 
altogether outside its range. 

In the end it is somewhat saddening to think that theo- 
logians will insist on identifying religion with theories of 
cosmogony. Their notion of God is not religion, not even 
an essential part of it, but a metaphysical theory of the uni- 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 231 

verse to which, whether true or not, religion has nothing to 
say. They may go on for ever questioning the eternal 
silence, and eternally will it be silent to their questionings. 
Therefore they do religion an ill service who identify it with 
the answers which they imagine they extort to questions to 
which no answer can be given, or any answer that is given 
must by its limitations be false. The pity of it is that with so 
ample a scope for their best energies of devotion and self- 
sacrifice in a wcrld so much needing to be made better, they 
should waste them in sterile endeavours to think the un- 
thinkable. Having settled clearly by an exhaustive criticism 
of their own faculties that they cannot know anything which 
is not relative, why immediately go back to the barren work 
of constructing theological, moral, or metaphysical theories of 
the absolute ? Yes, and from the very basis of that relativity 
which they have just proved and conceded to be no basis at 
all. Ideas realise perfection in different degrees, some being 
more, others less perfect — that is evident, they say ; there- 
fore it is legitimate to infer a complete or absolute perfection 
from which they are derived and which they in part and 
darkly resemble. But how from addition of imperfections 
ever get a perfection ? Having created a perfection in rela- 
tion to their ideas — that is, having set up an abstract perfec- 
tion of their own, which is still entirely relative — they there- 
upon see in the ideas proofs of a derivation from it, and 
draw from them an argument of its absolute existence. And 
so for ever round and round the self-beguiling circle. 

Every theory of cosmogony whatever is at bottom an 
outcome of nature expressing itself through human nature ; 
it is a product of that part of nature which is being human- 
ised in man's development, not a supersession of it by any 
influx from without ; it does not therefore ever, nor can it 
ever, dispense with that positive basis of nature, or possess 
a higher authority than its source, however much above the 
things of this world it may aspire or assume to be. How 
can that be knowledge which contradicts the fundamental 
data of reasoning and thinking by which alone knowledge 
is possible? In the end religion will preserve its vitality 
and strengthen its power only by breaking through old 



232 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

formulas, throwing off the encumbering fragments of dead 
creeds, and taking a new and purely human development : 
by effecting and reflecting, as Christianity at its outset 
did, a genuine human solidarity. The timid hypocrisies 
which hope to preserve it at the cost of the true, from fear 
of the consequences to morality if the truth be made 
known, will have to be abandoned ; and though the imme- 
diate result of their rejection may be sadly afflicting and 
seem to justify despair, yet we may take comfort in the 
certitude that the ultimate effects will be good. The true 
good cannot consist with what is not true ; for there is a soli- 
darity among the virtues, however they present themselves, 
whether as that which is true, or good, or beautiful. 



NOTES TO PART II. 



Page 195. 

Kant's doctrine is that there is a determination of the will by 
pure reason j that so reason gets practical reality ; and that in this 
absolute obedience the will has absolute assurance of its freedom. 
The moral law is a law spontaneously imposed on the will by pure 
reason : it stands high above all the motives, sensuous and their like, 
which determine the empirical will ; it pays no respect to them, but 
with an inward, irresistible necessity, orders us, in independence of 
them, to follow it absolutely and unconditionally — 'tis a categorical 
imperative, universal, and binding on every rational will. A happy 
thing, certainly, that a will determined to unconditional obedience 
by so absolute an authority retains nevertheless the absolute assur- 
ance of its freedom. But then comes the not unimportant question 
— What is it that practical reason categorically commands 1 How 
are we to know what the moral law dictates and forbids? The 
easiest thing in the world : let only those maxims of conduct derived 
from experience be adopted as motives which are susceptible of being 
made of universal validity — which are fit to be regarded as universal 
laws of reason to govern the actions of all mankind. I do right when 
I do what all persons would think right in similar circumstances. 
Very good, without doubt, although very like the common -place 
maxim of every ethical system ; but my difficulty has been to know 
in a particular case what all intelligent beings would think right. 
How am I to get at the universal standard or precept and apply it 
to my particular occasion, so as to know absolutely what I ought 
then to do 1 

Kant helps me by means of two remarkable illustrations. Suicide 
is one. Is suicide, under the strongest temptation conceivable, ever 
right 1 I must ask myself then, ' Is the principle of the admission 
that suicide is ever right fit to become a universal law] ' No, says 
Kant, it is not fit, since the universal practice of suicide would reduce 
the world to chaos. Very true ; but it is sadly disappointing to per- 
ceive that the sublime and supreme reason has, in order to become 
practical reality, found it necessary to come down from its supra- 
sensuous heights and to be no better than gross Utilitarianism. All 
16 



234 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

that it can tell me, panting for its supreme utterance, is that suicide 
is inexpedient as a universal principle of conduct — in fact, it makes 
use of the common motives of an experience which is nowise supra- 
sensuous, and instead of helping me to an absolute precept or standard 
to measure them by, actually comes to them for its authority. 

The second instance is no more helpful. May a person in the 
greatest need of a loan, which he knows he will not get unless he 
makes a solemn promise to repay what he is perfectly certain he never 
will be able to repay, make the promise 1 No, says Kant, for if it 
were a universal law, all faith in promises would be destroyed and 
nobody would lend money. In other words, in the long run it would 
be very bad for society that faith in promises should be destroyed. 
An excellent truth, which nobody will deny, but it evidently smacks 
much of the earth, earthy ; indeed, it would seem that those who 
discover the basis of morality in the social sanction may claim Kant, 
when he is not in the clouds, as an out-and-out supporter. 

Theories of freewill seem to come very much to this — that the 
will that is swayed by low motives is not free, that the will that is 
swayed by higher motives is more free, and that the will that is 
swayed by the highest motives is most free. Consequently when any 
one is blamed for having done ill, he is not blamed for having acted 
without motives, but for not having been actuated by the highest 
motives. Create an artificial world of names apart from the real 
world of facts — a world which shall simply be made up of negations of 
all qualities which we have actual experience of — and let the highest 
motive in it be known as the Will of God or abstract Supreme 
Reason, you get your service which you please to call perfect freedom. 



Page 231. 

We may notice how religion stands in relation to theology, 
according to one of the greatest modem exponents of those relations, 
and how it suffers by the enforced union. By religion, says Cardinal 
Newman, ' I mean the knowledge of God, of His Will, and of our 
duties to Him.' l At the outset then we are to understand that there 
can be no religion without a knowledge of God, of His Will, and of 
our duties to Him. A philosopher of the future from the ends 
of the earth, his mind not impregnated by inheritance, nor imbued 
by education, with the prepossessions of any theological system, will 

1 Grammar of Assent, pp. 384, 386, &c. 



CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 235 

naturally ask, What God? in face of the different gods that have 
been worshipped atsundry times and in divers places, and demand 
some credentials, as he has the right to do. He is a ' hidden God,' 
for ' what strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is His absence 
from His own world.' Then there is this further characteristic — 
' that the aspect under which Almighty God is presented to us by 
nature is (to use a figure) of one who is angry with us and threatens 
evil.' That is because ' our shortcomings are more frequent and im- 
portant than our fulfilment of the duties enjoined upon us,' and 
because the principle of His divine government ordains that the 
offender should suffer for his offence. In respect of this humanly 
vindictive character He resembles the gods which the savage has 
conceived for himself by the unaided light of nature ; and when we 
go to the authorised revelation of Him for further light, we meet 
with the exposition of like human characters, for we learn there that 
he is a jealous God, revengeful, easily provoked to anger, loving what 
pleases and hating what displeases Him ; who admires His own work, 
shows no mercy to His enemies, visits the sins of the fathers upon 
the children unto the third and fourth generations, and decrees 
eternal torment for those who observe not His commandments to keep 
them. Evidently this sentence of eternal damnation is the consum- 
mate evolution of the anger of a God made in the image of man. It 
is in a knowledge of Him, however, and His Will that the earnest 
inquirer is to seek and to find his duties as a man : the highest duties 
of man to God and man impossible of attainment save in that way. 
And how is he to attain such knowledge 1 By examining conscience. 
' Our great internal teacher of religion is conscience. . . . Conscience 
too teaches us not only that God is, but what He is ; it provides for 
the mind a real image of Him as a medium of worship ; it gives a 
rule of right and wrong as being His rule, and a code of moral duties.' 
Here then we learn what certainly is not a little surprising, that con- 
science teaches a knowledge of God, imparts a real image of Him, and 
gives us a code of moral duties. Kant recognised the moral impera- 
tive in conscience and fell down in adoration of it, but he never found 
a complete moral code there. Let a man only learn the art of inter- 
rogating conscience cleverly, and he has an infallible revelation of 
what God is and wills, of what He is like, and of what He ordains in 
every particular case. But will ever} 7 one be able really to find, if 
he tries, these stupendous contents in his conscience ? Will not the 
absolute which he finds attest the relativo of his conscience 1 Will the 
Delaware Indian or Andaman Islander ever extract these sublime posi- 
tive revelations from within himself? In truth it is to give an extra- 



236 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT. 

ordinary extension to the meaning of the word * conscience ' to find all 
these things in it ; for surely it is not the fact that the function of con- 
science is knowledge ; it is not by it that we know, but it is by it that 
we feel, the right and the obligation to do it and feel the wrong and the 
obligation to shun it. But there is no fixed measure in conscience by 
which is determined universally and infallibly what is the particular 
right or wrong ; for always, in all times and places, the particular right 
or wrong has answered to the moral development of the tribe, the com- 
munity, the nation. Conscience might more justly be described as 
the consocial sense, which is developed in men from con-science and 
confederation — i.e. from knowing and working together in social union, 
from unity in aim and means : set men to work together for a 
common end in a social union and they will end by feeling together. 
So it has come to pass that the consciences have notoriously been as 
various as the communities of men, and that Cardinal Newman finds 
at the present day in his conscience the cosmogony and the moral 
code of Christian theology, as interpreted and guaranteed by the in- 
fallible authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Had he lived 
among the savages who thought it a pious duty to eat their aged 
parents, he could not have failed to find in conscience the authority 
to eat his father, as he now in profoundest reverence eats the body of 
his God at the most holy ceremony of his faith. 



paet m. 

THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 



SECTION I. 

CONCERNING DEGENERATION. 

The attention of the philosophic and scientific world has 
been so much fixed on the theory of evolution, ever since 
Darwin set forth the main manner of the process by means 
of the survival of the fittest through natural selection, that 
there has been a proneness to overlook the fact that all we 
see and feel around us is not progress — in the sense we 
understand progress. Survival of the fittest does not mean 
always survival of the best in the sense of the highest organ- 
ism ; it means only the survival of that which is best suited 
to the circumstances, good or bad, in which it is placed — the 
survival of a savage in a savage social medium, of a rogue 
among rogues, of a parasite where a parasite alone can live. 
A decline from a higher to a lower level of being, a process, 
that is to say, of degeneration, is an integrant and active 
part of the economy of nature. Besides the organisms that 
have become step by step more and more complex and per- 
fect, there are organisms that have plainly lost in the suc- 
cessions of the ages organs which, bringing them, when fchej 
had them, into wider and freer and closer relations with the 
external world, ministered to a higher and fuller life than 
they enjoy now: witness in proof, for example, the wingless 
beetles of Madeira, the rudimentary wings of the birds of 
oceanic isles, the imperfect and nearly useless wings of 
domestic fowls like the Cochin China fowl, the small eyes of 



238 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

moles, some parasites tha,t live on other organisms ; and I 
might justly go on to add such instances as the lapse of 
heroic feeling in commercial states, the loss of self-respect in 
the courtier, the demoralisation of popular preachers and of 
popular scientific lecturers, and many others of a like kind 
which illustrate the subdual of the person's nature to the 
moral atmosphere that he works in. It is the same with a 
creed or system of belief ; in which, when it undergoes de- 
generation, the higher parts waste and the lower parts grow. 
Tor example, when a savage people are converted to Christi- 
anity they assimilate by natural affinity the lowest elements, 
and reject, being unable to apprehend them, the highest; 
so the higher element disappears, or is degraded by the 
association of low ideas into something quite different ; the 
unique figure of Jesus Christ becoming no more than that of 
the biggest fetish, the fetish of the white man. 

Disuse of function leads everywhere to decay of organ ; by 
decay of organ going on through generations that which was 
complete and capable becomes rudimentary and incapable ; 
and so in a backward course the organ or organism reaches 
a state of degradation of which it is hard to say sometimes 
whether it is the relic of a more perfect structure which has 
been, or the inchoate rudiment of a new structure which is to 
be. Then it presents a problem about which men may doubt 
and dispute, just as in reference to their own true position in 
nature they have disputed whether they are what they are by 
a degeneration from a higher to a lower state, or whether 
they are steps in a process of evolution from a lower to a 
higher state, ascendent or descendent, beings a little lower 
than the angels or a little higher than the brutes. How- 
ever that be — and the possible angelic relation is not a matter 
of great moment, since the angels that they were only a 
little lower than could not in any case have been of a very 
exalted kind — it admits of no doubt that a law of degenera- 
tion is manifest in human events ; that each individual, each 
family, each nation may take either an upward course of 
evolution or a downward course of degeneracy. Noteworthy 
too in this relation is the fact that when the organism — 
individual, social, or national — has reached a certain state of 



CONCERNING DEGENERATION. 239 

complex evolution it inevitably breeds changes in itself which 
disintegrate and in the end destroy it. It cannot maintain 
its equilibrium for ever in face of its environment, and ceas- 
ing to aggregate to itself it begins to disintegrate, ceasing to 
progress begins to regress, ceasing to develope begins to de- 
cline : changing always, when it changes not for the better 
it changes for the worse. Perfect repose is death. Here 
again a creed or system of belief behaves in the same way, 
giving rise in the process of its decomposition to retrograde 
products that cannot serve for evolution, since they are 
events of a dissolution which, as disintegrants, they help to 
expedite. It is a process which may not perhaps be easily 
traced in the case of a particular belief, but it is evident 
enough after one of those great historical events, such as the 
break-up of a sj^stem of religion or of a political constitution, 
which befall only at intervals of centuries. 

In nature, as we see it, we seem to see a conflict of 
warring opposites : gravitation opposed, or rather indeed 
complemented, by repulsion ; chemical affinities by chemical 
repulsions ; magnetic attraction by electric repulsion ; evo- 
lution by dissolution; conservatism by revolution, quiet or 
catastrophic ; love by hate ; self-love by love of kind ; heaven 
by hell. Certain it is that hate and destruction are just as 
necessary agents as love and production in nature, which 
could no more be, or be conceived to be, without the one than 
without the other ; and to call the one good more than the 
other, however necessary from the standpoint of human ego- 
ism, is just as if one were to call gravitation good and repul- 
sion bad, as gravitation, had it self-consciousness, would no 
doubt do. In order to have a theory of cosmogony that 
shall cover all the facts, it has always been necessary to sup- 
plement a good principle by a bad principle, a God of love 
and creation by a God of hate and destruction. And it must 
always be so. We may, agreeably to the logic of our wishes, 
comfort ourselves in our pilgrimage by entertaining the hope 
and belief of the working out of good through evil and of the 
permanence of good after the disappearance of evil, just as, 
if it were useful and pleasing to us to cherish the illusion, 
we might persuade ourselves that repulsion will one day be 



240 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

annihilated and gravitation endure, or that evolution will 
continue and dissolution cease to be ; but if we look at the 
matter in the cold spirit of strictly rational inquiry we shall 
always find abundant reason to believe that the sum of the 
respective energies of good and evil remains a constant 
quantity, the respective distribution only varying, and that 
we might as well try to increase the height of the mountain 
without increasing the depth of the valley, as to increase the 
good in the world by purging it of its so-called evil. 

And now to inquire briefly what is meant by degenera- 
tion. It means literally an unbinding, the undoing of a 
kind, and in this sense was first used to express the change 
of kind without regard to whether the change was to perfect 
or to degrade ; but it is now used exclusively to denote a 
change from a higher to a lower kind, that is to say, from a 
more complex to a less complex organisation : it is a process 
of dissolution, the opposite of that process of involution 
which is pre-essential to evolution. In proportion therefore 
to the complexity of evolution is the possible diversity of 
degeneration : the more complex the organism the greater 
the number and variety of its diseases; the more varied 
and beautiful animal forms are, the greater are the varieties 
of the examples of ugliness and degradation which they 
furnish ; and great cities which are the centres of the best 
intellectual light become naturally the centres of the 
greatest vices. Bacon had noticed the fact of degeneration 
in plants and laid stress upon it — ' This rule,' he says, * is 
certain, that plants for want of culture degenerate to be 
baser in the same kind, and sometimes so far as to change 
into another kind ; ' and he enumerates certain changes of 
condition which bring the changes about. Not that a 
process of degeneration ever brings a higher species of 
organism to the structural pattern of a lower species; in 
order to do that, it would have to go backwards through as 
long a reach of time, and as many stages of regressive ex- 
perience in relation to simultaneous regressive changes of 
surroundings, as the lower species had traversed forwards in 
its npward transpeciation. Granted that man comes of an 
ancestral stock common to him and the monkey, still no 



CONCERNING DEGENERATION. 241 

excess of degeneration would ever reduce him to the monkey- 
pattern ; it may certainly sink him very low, as the repulsive 
example of a speechless, helpless and slavering idiot shows, 
but the traits of degeneracy bear a distinctly human stamp, 
they have that superscription and image. The unbinding 
which we call degeneration is not then the reduction of a 
higher kind to a lower normal kind, but the transformation 
of it into a new or abnormal kind ; a kind which, incapable 
of rising in the scale of development, tends naturally to sink 
lower and lower. 

As in the decomposition of a complex organic compound 
new products are formed that had no part in its composition, 
and that are never met with except as the products of such 
decomposition; or as new morbid elements are formed in the 
disintegrating processes of disease, the ravages of which 
they thereupon accelerate ; so new products of an asocial or 
antisocial kind are formed in the retrograde metamorphosis 
of the human kind; wherefore it is that we meet with not 
only degenerate varieties of the kind, such as idiots and 
lunatics are, but also with a great many forms and varieties 
of degradation in persons who are neither idiots nor lunatics. 
Is it not, for example, a remarkable thing, when we think 
of it, that man, highest of the animals — so much so that 
the base kinship repugns him — should have invented and 
practised everywhere a variety of sexual vices which no 
animals, though having as strong sexual passions as he has, 
ever perpetrate ? The ingenuity of vice which he has 
achieved in that respect has reached the limit of its variety 
only in the limits of the physical capacities of his bodily 
mechanism; so that, these having been now exhausted, 
happily no one, how great soever his practical genius, will 
be able to invent a new vice of that sort. He has used his 
reason to be more brutal than the brutes ; and when he has 
devised and done some deed so ingeniously bad that no 
brute ever did the like, he characterises it specially as brutal 
and inhuman. Brutal, that is to say, when no brute was 
ever capable of it, inhuman when it is entirely and exclu- 
sively human 1 



242 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

It is not the brute, but the degradation of the brute in 
him, that he ought to accuse; for instead of using his 
higher nature to exalt his lower nature he has used its 
resources to degrade the latter to the utmost. The variety 
of his ingenious vices bespeaks the foul misuse of his superior 
reason to gratify the fundamental passions and selfish im- 
pulses of his nature ; he exhausts all the devices of ingenuity 
in order to enhance and multiply desires and to vary the 
modes of their gratification ; and in doing that, blind the 
while to the necessity of idealising, he is in the state of 
all states most dangerous — that of man knowing and real- 
ising the truth that he is animal, but not knowing and 
realising the truth that he is not all animal. The po- 
tentiality of a more complex development is always the 
potentiality of a more varied degeneration : the height of 
Heaven the measure of the depth of Hell. He does well 
then to upbraid, in fitting terms of disgust and contempt, 
the prostitution of reason to the guilty degradation of his 
animal nature — though libelling the animal in the terms he 
uses — to the end that the thought of what he has done may 
turn him from the wrong way of degeneration and urge him 
to pursue the right way of evolution. Eetrograde products 
of any sort, however, are no less normal in their way than 
the products of evolution, just as earthquakes are as natural 
as summer breezes, pestilences as natural as prayers. When 
men describe them as abnormal, unnatural and the like, it 
is because they regard them from one aspect of human life 
— from the standpoint of a progressive human movement. 
View them as events of the Whole, as an all-encompassing, 
all-seeing Being might be supposed to do, and in that uni- 
versal view from the standpoint of a regressive human 
movement — a tide which, flowing here and now, ebbs there 
and then — and they would seem most fit and proper. 



section n. 

CONGENITAL DEFICIENCY OR ABSENCE OF MORAL FEELING 
AND WILL. 

In what function, and in what changes of it, is it that the 
beginnings of human degeneracy show themselves? It is 
obvious that in searching for the answer to this question we 
must occupy ourselves with the most highly developed states 
of man, since the earliest and most subtile signs of degene- 
ration can be found only in the most fully developed 
specimens. Bear in mind that our business now is with the 
individual, not with the complex union of individuals which 
is known as a nation, albeit it may be of interest to note in 
passing that national degeneration begins in what is strictly 
a demoralisation — namely, in a loss of patriotism ; by which 
I mean not the noisy and aggressive so-called patriotism 
that rushes into quarrels and combats in order to aggrandise 
the nation, but the calm and pure patriotism which, 
inspiring self-abnegation and the sacrifice of individual 
interests to the good of the community, consolidates a 
nation. In like manner, in the individual it is the function 
of will in the highest moral sphere — the region of moral 
feeling which, representing the highest reach of evolution, 
is the consummate inflorescence of human culture — that 
will be the first to exhibit signs of impairment : the latest 
and highest product of social evolution, that which, latest 
organised, is least stable, will be the first to undergo disso- 
lution. 

In order to ascertain whether the facts of observation 
agree with this deduction it will be right to examine them 
frankly, without bias, and to see what independent induction 
they warrant. Should the induction and the deduction 
a^ree, all the more shall we feel the conclusion sound. 
Look then in the first instance at the lowest specimens of 
beings in a civilised people, those who, marking the last 
term of human degeneracy, have never had the responsibility 
even of a capacity to degenerate, having been born essen- 



244 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

tially deficient — the congenital idiots; beings who, disin- 
herited of their human birthright by reason of native defect 
of bodily structure generally and of cerebral structure and 
function in particular, are incapable of a normal mental 
development, and some of them incapable of any mental 
development whatever. In them we have human beings so 
radically deteriorated, and that without any fault of their 
own, souls so enthralled somehow in the meshes of unsuit- 
able matter, that they are without the potentiality of 
becoming truly human. They are a reductio ad absurdum of 
humanity by the logic of facts : a pretty plain proof that 
the way of evolution goes in the opposite direction to the 
way by which they have come to be. It is not enough to 
dismiss them from consideration as monstrosities, morbid 
products, anomalies, abnormal creatures, accidents, and the 
like, for that sort of labelling of them is not in the least 
instructive, nor does it advance matters a step ; they have 
been bred of human stock and are what they are by virtue 
of natural processes, the laws of which may be investigated 
and their issues modified. We cannot blame the idiot for 
being what he is : whom then can we blame ? If we may 
not accuse the bungling of his father who begot him, or the 
folly of his mother who conceived and bore him, assuredly 
we have the right to hold mankind responsible for him. 

Putting aside what may be called accidental causes of 
idiocy, that is to say, causes arising out of some accident or 
bad state of health in the parents, one pretty sure and 
regular way of producing the congenital defect is by the 
increase of degeneracy through generations. Were a 
curious person minded to breed a race of idiots he would 
probably obtain a large measure of success by setting a 
number of insane, epileptic, and weak-minded persons to 
propagate; so he would bring degeneracy to its patho- 
logical term, human disintegration to its simplest retrograde 
human product. If he tried to reach a still lower depth in 
this deep of degeneracy by setting idiots to breed, or if he 
aspired to keep up a race of idiots in that way, he would 
fail; he would find it impossible to carry the retrograde 
metamorphosis or process of dehumanisation any further; 



CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 245 

impotence and sterility in his breed of idiots would bring 
his experiments to an abrupt end. Nature has put a limit 
to dehumanisation in the qualities which she exacts in order 
that the combination of two individuals to produce a third 
may take place at all. There are then two terms between 
which all sorts and varieties of men may be ranged — the 
lowest term of degeneration and the highest term of evolu- 
tion, and towards the one or the other of them each indi- 
vidual in the fluent line of being is tending : a double flux 
of movement, as it were, ascendent and descendent, the 
ways or modes of degeneration in the descendent line being 
almost as many and divers as the varieties of evolution in 
the ascendent line. Some persons are high on the upward, 
others low on the downward, path ; many are just entering 
upon the one or the other ; but there is no one who is not 
himself going in the one or the other direction and making 
the way which he takes easier for others to follow in. 

It goes without saying that among other qualities in 
which idiots are wanting they are wanting in moral feeling 
and will; indeed, the manifold varieties of idiocy and im- 
becility, representing all degrees and sorts of mental 
deficience from the least to the greatest, yield examples 
of all degrees of moral deprivation and of volitional 
impotence. Here it shall suffice to call attention to a case 
well suited to bring home to the mind the necessity of a 
scientific view of such defects and of a scientific inquiry 
into their nature ; and it is of set purpose that I select an 
instance which presents no marked nor even manifest defect 
of brain and of ordinary intelligence, but in which the 
moral derangement is extreme ; because it will serve to 
show how the fine layer of moral feeling and the supreme 
reason embedded in it, so to speak, may be deranged or 
clean stripped off from the mind at the beginning of its 
degeneracy, without the ordinary intelligence being seriously 
touched. 

The case is that of a young child, five or six years of 
age only, which is causing its anxious parents no little ap- 
prehension and distress by the singularly precocious display 
of vicious proclivities of all sorts, quite out of keeping 



246 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

with its tender years — mischievous and destructive impulses, 
cruel and perverse acts, amazing skill in thieving and 
lying, even perhaps a startling sexual precocity — and by 
the utter failure of either precept or example or correction 
to imbue it with right feeling and with the desire to do 
right. So strong is the natural bent to, and so intense the 
immediate pleasure in, these wrong-doings that punishment 
is useless to check them. It may not, as I have said, be 
notably deficient in intelligence; on the contrary, it is 
sometimes capable of learning quickly when it pleases, par- 
ticularly perhaps in some special line of knowledge for which 
it shows a singular talent, and it displays acute cunning 
in finding and devising the occasions to gratify its evil in- 
clinations. It is a moral idiot without being an idiot in 
self-seeking and self-serving intelligence : the defect of 
intelligence is that it is capable only of half its function, 
being acute to apprehend self, impotent to apprehend the 
social not-self. Not that the child can be said to be 
altogether insensible to the difference between right and 
wrong, since it invariably shuns the right and chooses the 
wrong, and shows an amazing acuteness in the means it 
uses to escape detection and the punishment that might 
follow detection. But it certainly does not feel the right as 
right, as something stirring an impulse of attraction, and 
the wrong as wrong, as something stirring an impulse of 
repulsion; and accordingly punishment awakens no sensi- 
bility to the social or moral meaning of conduct, no internal 
social response, provokes only an acuter display of low 
cunning in the endeavour to evade it. The creature is 
truly an asocial being. So incorribly vicious as it is at so 
tender an age, so perseveringly set on evil-doing, so utterly 
incapable of penitence, everybody who has to do with it feels 
in the end that it is not really responsible for its conduct, 
perceives sadly that the severest punishment cannot do it 
the least good, and is constrained to acknowledge that it 
labours under a native incapacity of moral development : it 
is congenitally conscienceless. 

The main scientific interest of a case of the kind lies in 
the inquiry how it is that a human being has been born 



CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 247 

into the world who is unimbued with innate moral, and is 
imbued with innate immoral, tendencies ; who will, nay must, 
go wrong in virtue of his bad organisation, and who mani- 
fests such precocious capabilities of wickedness. Putting 
aside the theory of Satanic inspiration as not being an 
adequate explanation in an age that at least is infected 
with the spirit, where it is not imbued with the habit, of 
scientific thought, and having the certitude that the effect 
defective comes by cause, we look to the line of the child's 
descent for an explanation, to the nature of the antecedents 
of which it is the consequent, and seek in ancestral infirm- 
ities, errors, misfortunes, and wrong-doings for the cause of 
the defective organisation ; defective, that is to say, for 
social organisation, but, everything being by a divine dis- 
pensation good of its kind, very effective for social disorgan- 
isation. As a general fact it will be found that such 
children are descended from a family in which insanity or 
epilepsy or some form or other of mental degeneracy exists, 
and exists not as an accident but as an essential outcome of 
character ; that they are antisocial upshots of a process of 
degeneration in the line of their descent, manufactured 
morbid varieties of the human kind. The lapse or absence 
of the highest inhibitory sensibilities and powers in the lives 
of the parents has issued so in the nature of the offspring — 
those antisocial in life, these are asocial conge nitally : it is an 
example of the law of degeneration avenging the infraction 
of the law of evolution : a product and a nemesis at the 
same moment. 

Taking free leave to put complicated and obscure facts 
into a somewhat ideally simple scheme, one might represent 
the stages of descent in this fashion: 1. Absence of exercise 
and through disuse decay, of the highest social sensibi- 
lities and powers, moral and volitional, in one generation ; 
therewith lifelong, unchecked exercise of the secondary or 
social developments of the egoistic passions in the conduct 
of life; a consequent moral degeneration which by its nature 
goes deeper into character than intellectual degeneration. 
2. In a succeeding generation some form or other of positive 
mental derangement; or such a development of vice in char- 



248 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

acter as falls a little short only of madness or of crime. 3. 
In the third generation moral imbecility or idiocy, with or 
without corresponding intellectual infirmity. This sort of 
ideal scheme will serve to mark the main line of the course 
of degeneration, which may, however, be modified greatly in 
particular cases ; for as, on the one hand, the second stage 
may be omitted altogether, and by an unpropitious reinforce- 
ment of the bad tendencies, through the meeting of two de- 
generate lines, the third follow directly upon the first; so 
on the other hand, owing to the combinations, neutralisations 
and other modifications to which ample scope and occasion 
are given by the introduction of the elements of a fresh stock 
in each generation, and to the inherent tendency which there 
is in every organism to revert to a sound type, the outcome 
of the degeneracy may be delayed, modified, or hindered alto- 
gether. This broad lesson, however, remains for us — namely, 
that the acquired infirmity of one generation will, unless coun- 
tervailing influences of breed, of training, or of surroundings 
are brought to bear meanwhile, become the natural defici- 
ence of a succeeding generation : it is the old tale, as old as 
history, that when the fathers have eaten sour grapes the 
children's teeth are set on edge. Most certain it is that men 
are not bred well or ill by accident, little as they reck of it 
in practice, any more than are the animals the select breed- 
ing of which they make such a careful study ; that there are 
laws of hereditary action working definitely in direct trans- 
mission of qualities, or indirectly through combinations and 
repulsions, neutralisations and modifications of qualities ; and 
that it is by virtue of these laws determining the moral and 
physical constitution of every individual that a good result 
ensues in one case, a bad result in another. 

Of many striking examples of deprivation or derange- 
ment of moral feeling and will in young persons that might 
be given, let one suffice here : that of a rather sharp-looking 
boy, eight years of age when I saw him, who, however, had 
not been able to learn anything systematically ; not even a 
game of play, since to play with a hoop exacted more atten- 
tion and perseverance than he had been able to give. In 
fact he could not hold his attention to anything, though 



CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 249 

very quick in instant perception. He was, however, most 
ingenious in mischief which he never missed an opportunity 
of doing, and delighted to talk of playing some viciously 
mischievous trick, in the imaginative description of which he 
exulted in a braggart and grotesquely dramatic fashion ; 
chattering incessantly and running from subject to subject, 
without other connection than the unity of character given 
to them by the leading bent of his destructive disposition. 
Though he could tell stories of the events and even minute 
experiences of years back with surprising exactness of details, 
he had no perception of truth, but evinced an inexhaustible 
and uncontrollable craving for what might have been called 
lying, had his nature been in the least sensible to truth, but 
what were really the constructions of a vivid and busy ima- 
gination revelling in its vicious activity. His continual talk 
was of killing persons or animals that had in any way offended 
him or ruffled his prodigious conceit ; and he was ludicrously 
ferocious and boastful in his dramatic conceptions and cir- 
cumstantial descriptions of the grand way in which he would 
do it. His father had died of what was called softening of 
the brain soon after he was forty years old, having been insane 
for some time before his death ; his paternal grandmother 
had died demented in an asylum at a great age, having lived 
there for upwards of twenty years ; on his mother's side also 
there was insanity, and she herself, though not actually 
insane, was extremely excitable and a singularly insincere 
and shifty-minded person. What wonder then that a con- 
genitally defective moral organisation was the term of that 
line of descent ! The creature was degenerate before it was 
generate. 

It will not be amiss to take particular notice of the three 
prominent phenomena of his mental pathology : first, a com- 
plete absence of any germ of moral sense, his asocial nature 
in that respect, whence no response to the higher social 
stimuli and no capacity to assimilate them— that is, to take 
and make them into its own nature; secondly, his congenital 
inability to apply his attention steadily so as to get a proper 
hold or apprehension of external realities and their relations 

— a fatal defect, for the monkey is not teachable that cannot 
17 



250 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

attend, and the monkey most teachable that attends the 
best; thirdly, an extraordinarily active display of the con- 
structive energy of brain that we call imagination, unin- 
formed by lessons of experience which it could not properly 
assimilate, and ill inspired by the vicious mood of his men- 
tal nature, whose energies it absorbed into its predominant 
and almost exclusive activity. Clearly the vital energy of 
the stock, even in the higher expressions of it in the nervous 
system, were not exhausted, had other defects not precluded 
its proper development. Though an extreme instance, it 
may serve to teach what little value is to be set on imagina- 
tion when it is uninformed by observation and undisciplined 
by reason. 

A second question that is of scientific interest in cases of 
the kind is how it happens that creatures so young are cap- 
able of displaying so extraordinary a sexual precocity as they 
do sometimes. Those who observe it with dismay are apt to 
be painfully shocked by the spectacle and to cry out against 
it as if it were not human. But it is human enough. If 
the true problem be, as it certainly is, not the origin of evil, 
but the origin of good in mankind, the products of the de- 
generation of the kind may be expected naturally to exhibit 
disintegrate displays of its fundamental egoistic passions. 
In what modes else could the decomposition or disintegration 
of human nature show itself? Were the infant in arms 
possessed of power answering in measure to the outbursts of 
its transitory passions, had it a giant's strength in its feeble 
limbs to execute its froward will when it goes into contor- 
tions of rage because it does not like to be washed, it would 
be as dangerous and destructive as any madman : it is the 
helplessness of its body which, rendering it impotent, makes 
it innocent. It is well to idealise, but it is not necessary to 
suffer the brightness of the ideal wholly to obscure the real, 
and it is not well therefore to take quite seriously the vast 
deal of nonsense that is written concerning the purity and 
innocence of childhood ; the purity is a negative purity at 
best, a blank virtue, while the activities that exist are for 
the most part not innocent. Are not children, as La Bruyere 
described them, naturally boastful, scornful, passionate, 



CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 251 

envious, curious, selfish, idle, prone to steal, apt at dissimu- 
lation, and ready liars ; easily moved to immoderate joy or 
thrown into excessive grief by trifles; not willing themselves 
to suffer but eager and pleased to inflict suffering ? It is a 
description that would suit well for savages in a low state of 
civilisation, though no one would be vehemently eager to 
ascribe purity and innocence to them. 

Take away from a young child's mind the germs of those 
highest inhibitory functions that are presupposed by a poten- 
tiality of moral development, and you leave the natural pas- 
sions and instincts free play; not the fundamental instincts 
of animal nature only, but the secondary or acquired egoistic 
passions into which, in a complex social state with its dif- 
ferenced interests and pursuits, the primary instincts have 
undergone development. To lie, to counterfeit, to deceive, 
to envy, to hate, to steal, to devise cunning means to gratify 
sense or interest are human enough qualities ; everybody 
may, I suppose, be said truly to be a potential liar, a poten- 
tial thief, a potential adulterer, even a potential murderer, 
since whatever sinner any man has been every man needs 
to pray that he may not be ; and therefore it is natural that 
the congenitally unsound or defective individual inherits and 
displays some of these potentialities, more or fewer according 
to the degree and variety of degeneration that he represents. 
It is because its kind is in it, mutilated, fragmentary, disin- 
tegrated, and the more special evolution of kind which con- 
stitutes its family-nature, that the morally imbecile child 
sometimes shows startling immoral aptitudes, and talents 
in vice that certainly could never have been acquired by it ; 
any more than the sexual movements which it may perform 
with surprising skill could have been voluntarily devised and 
performed by it, or are voluntarily devised and performed by 
any one. The degrees and varieties of moral and intellectual 
defect will, of course, be as many as the degrees and forms 
of the degeneracy. In the lowest examples of all there will 
scarcely be a clearly expressed instinct, nothing more than 
the uncertain show of a vague, feeble and faltering instinct 
of self-conservation not reaching beyond the mere appetite 
fur food, without any sense of the means to gratify it ; at a 



252 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

little higher level you shall have the sexual and self-con- 
servative instincts in gross, bestial, and perhaps perverted 
display ; and at a higher level still, with the social egoistic 
instincts in pretty full activity, there will be an entire 
absence of the altruistic instincts, accompanied it may be 
by a great deal of cunning intelligence. From all which it 
plainly appears that in the downward process of the undoing 
of the human nature belonging to a complex social develop- 
ment an early event is a deprivation or a depravation of 
moral feeling and will : how indeed could it be otherwise if, 
as I have previously argued, the altruistic impulse is formed 
out of the social fusion and transmutation of the egoistic 
impulses ? 

Another proof, were other proof necessary, of the in- 
nate fixity of immoral or anti-social potentialities, and of the 
less fixed and stable nature of moral instinct, is that moral 
action in any of its modes is not an absolute instinct in any 
person ; there is always the consciousness of, sometimes the 
glance at, and oftentimes the resisted inclination to the 
opposite course ; at any rate there is not the instant, direct, 
blind, unquestioning obedience to an instinct that there is 
in a man's walking upright. No one in walking seems to 
entertain the notion of going on all fours, but the mind of 
the most chaste and virtuous man alive is invaded sometimes 
by the intrusive thought of adultery which he has not the 
least intention to practise. Let a man's heart overflow with 
brotherly love to his kind, it is still sensible, deep in it, of 
occasional pulses intimating that at bottom men naturally 
hate one another. So it is with other evil imaginations of 
the heart. Were the secrets of all hearts laid open, it 
would be a strange phantasmagoria of evil thoughts passing 
through the minds of the best of men, thoughts that they 
would shrink with horror from letting the tongue put into 
words ; many times no more than vague, half- formed, fleet- 
ing fancies, like the changing shapes of drifting clouds, but 
sometimes marshalled by busy imagination into more or less 
vivid and coherent tableaus and dramas, without exciting 
any more horror than similar thoughts do in dreams, when 
we break all the ten commandments with serene equanimity. 



CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 253 

Why not, if the inspiration of the moral sense be at bottom 
social and external ? Obviously, when the supreme inhibi- 
tory functions are suspended or destroyed, high reason and 
will dethroned, these hidden and subjected tendencies will, 
like slaves in a servile rebellion, come turbulently to the 
front and disport themselves riotously. 

But is it always in such case that only what was 
unseen is now unveiled by the removal of the restraint, 
or is there sometimes a positive growth or new develop- 
ment of vice after the removal ? Was all that evil actually 
in the man which he displays when reason and will are 
dethroned by mental derangement? Was your sister or 
brother or lover whom you esteemed as a model of virtuous 
innocence, and against the smallest suspicion of whose 
purity of mind you would have indignantly revolted, really 
so degraded a creature, and you knew it not? No, not 
so : the germs of immoral tendencies were there, as they 
are in all persons, but they grew and underwent patho- 
logical development by mutual interaction after the over- 
throw of reason and will, not otherwise than as they disport 
themselves in new functional activities of a transient kind 
during dreams. After dissociation of mental elements there 
takes place the association of congenial elements of the dis- 
sociate products. Psychologists have a good deal to learn yet 
before they apprehend adequately the purely organic con- 
structive energies of the brain for good or ill that lie beneath 
consciousness and do that which we are conscious of only in 
the result; by virtue of which it is that just as the sound 
mental organisation when exposed to wholesome influences 
developes in higher thoughts and imaginations, so the un- 
sound mental organisation which is incapable of wholesome 
assimilation developes in morbid thoughts and impulses and 
imaginings. It is the lower nature in the man asserting its 
autonomy, so to speak, in a rapid degenerative growth wlnn 
the control of the higher nature is withdrawn. The concep- 
tion and execution of a new degradation by any one is not 
more bodily nor less mental than the conception and execu- 
tion of a great invention or of a great work of art ; only in 
the former case it is the energy of degeneration, in the latter 



254 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

case the energy of development. To ask that the morbid 
mind should stay at a certain level of degeneracy and cease 
to display new morbid functions would be very much like 
asking that a morbid growth amid healthy structures should 
not increase and undergo its own changes independently of 
them ; or to ask that the physiologically inco-ordinate move- 
ments of convulsions should forbear to have any pathological 
co-ordination whatever. Not to exercise and to grow to the 
exercise of one's better nature, is to exercise and to grow to 
the exercise of one's worse nature. 

Were anybody to observe carefully what goes on in his 
mind during waking, he would perceive that it was the 
theatre of as many fantastic, grotesque, incoherent thoughts 
as in dreams; but they are fleeting and not attended to, 
because consciousness is fixed on the events and interests of 
real life, whereas in dreams they are solely active, usurp 
what consciousness there is, and so become more or less 
dramas. Obviously it will depend much on the occupation 
that each one gives his mind, and on the habits of attention 
and thought that he has trained it to, how large a part these 
incoherent vagaries of thought and imagination shall play in 
his waking mind, and indeed in some measure even in his 
dreams also. Were men ordinarily in the habit of thinking 
coherently, as they fondly flatter themselves they are, were 
they not actually dreaming during more than half their wak- 
ing lives, their very dreams would be a great deal more co- 
herent than they are now. The incoherences of ordinary 
dreams are no more than stronger instances of the incohe- 
rences of the ordinary thoughts of most persons. By the 
habitual practice of accurate observation and reflection when 
awake, owing to the engagement of the attention in the steady 
pursuit of some line of systematic study, the dreams that take 
place become less incoherent, are indeed sometimes entirely 
coherent, and a happy thought perhaps occurs that one 
gladly retains on waking. Now if it be thus possible by 
good and regular exercise of the higher faculties of mind to 
gain some mastery over thought in dreams, how much more 
is it within our power and shown to be our duty to obtain 
and exercise dominion over the vain and evil thoughts, in- 



CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 255 

cl'raations and imaginings of the day, and so to hinder their 
luxuriant growth ! 

Before passing from the consideration of the nature and 
meaning of moral imbecility and of its obvious lessons, it 
will not perhaps be amiss to state that the idiot must of ne- 
cessity be essentially an anti-social being, passive or active, 
according to the degree and character of his congenital de- 
privation: active and anti-social when he displays vicious 
desires and tendencies, as the moral idiot does ; passive and 
asocial when, by reason of a deeper and more general depriva- 
tion of mind, he is capable of little more than a vegetative 
life. In the latter case, the organs by which he should make 
sensible acquaintance with the external world and react to 
its impressions upon him, so as to apprehend it justly, are 
manifestly defective. The dulness of sensibility, more or less 
evident in all idiots, is very remarkable in some : witness the 
new-born idiotic infant that hardly feels at all and shows no 
instinct to find and little power to touch and grasp the 
mother's nipple when it is put to the breast ; or that older 
idiot at the Earlswood Asylum that sat smiling at its ease 
while its toenail was torn off. 1 As one would expect, moral 
insensibility is more common and more complete among 
them than insensibility to pain : take as instance the idiot 
mentioned by Morel who, being accustomed to assist at the 
funerals in the asylum of which he was an inmate, and to 
be rewarded for his services on each occasion with a little 
tobacco, killed another patient during a long dearth of deaths 
in order that there might be a funeral; or an imbecile boy 
I saw in an asylum on one occasion who had all but succeeded 
in strangling an idiot child, giving no other reason for his act 
than that he * thought he'd put him out of his misery.' This 
boy was not entirely devoid of intelligence, as the cool motive 
of his act showed; moreover, he could read and write a little, 
and do a simple calculation ; and when he was asked the 
question he acknowledged that what he had done was wrong 
and that he should not like to be treated so himself, his 
vacantly smiling face assuming for the moment a caricature- 
like seriousness and then relapsing into empty giggle, llis 

1 Mentioned by Dr. Grabham, late Superintendent of that Asylum. 



256 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

admission that it was wrong was plainly the mere parrot-like 
repetition of words of the meaning of which he had no real 
feeling. Many times the idiot is not less deficient in powers 
of motor reaction than he is in sensibility to impressions, so 
that in extreme cases he is quite unable to build up in him- 
self any conception of the external world, and unable in any 
case to build up an adequate conception of it. And aptly do 
the sluggish muscles of his expressionless face betray his 
mental vacancy : for as it is through the eye mainly that we 
take in or apprehend the world, so it is through the eye that 
the world as we have apprehended it looks out ; or, speaking 
more correctly, as it is through the muscular system that the 
external world is built up in us, so the world as it has been 
built up is expressed in the whole bodily features as they 
have been moulded by the fit muscular actions of habitual 
internal states. He is a poor medical psychologist who can- 
not see idiocy in the walk as well in the talk of his patient ; 
and he will be a very expert psychologist in time to come 
who shall read a full knowledge of the whole character of 
any individual in his gait, carriage, conformation, features 
and look. With that reflection I take leave of the idiot. 
Placed, as he is, in the midst of a complex social develop- 
ment, without the faculties to feel and to respond to the 
many and special complex and refined relations of his sur- 
roundings, he is necessarily a being apart, isolated, as his 
name (IBKorrjs) implies ; and if he has any active tendencies 
they are such as, being inspired grossly by the self-conserva- 
tive instinct generally, or by the sexual instinct sometimes, 
are likely to bring him into trouble. 



SECTION III. 

DEGENERATION OF MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 

Continuing our studies in moral pathology, the next fact to 
claim notice is that degenerative disease will impair or 
destroy moral feeling, leaving the person as destitute in 
that respect as if he were without the capacity of moral 
feeling in consequence of congenitally defective organisation. 
Of nervous disorders that affect mental function hysteria is 
perhaps that which furnishes the strangest and most 
grotesque examples of depravation of moral feeling and 
will. It is not merely that hysterical women, without 
deliberate consciousness on their part, simulate different 
diseases so closely that it is many times hard and sometimes 
impossible to say whether they have them or not, deceiving 
themselves and others, but in exti mer cases of moral per- 
version they wilfully and designedly fabricate diseases and 
inflict long and painful sufferings on themselves in carrying 
the deception through. To this class of half deceived and 
half deceiving impostors belong the ecstatics or stigmatics 
who fall into periodical trances from which they awake with 
blood oozing from the palms of the hands and from tbo skin 
of the forehead, in imitation of the bleedings of Jei 
Christ from the nails that were driven through his hands 
and the crown of thorns that was set on his head, thej 
having secretly pricked themselves with a needle or pin 
during the supposed unconsciousness; the fasting ^\rU who 
profess to live without food, which they contrive to 
secretly themselves or to have secretly conveyed to them ; 
the paralytics who keep their beds for years or are wheeled 
about in Bath chairs, when they have no other paralysis 
than that of will and could rise and walk at any moment if 
a strong enough motive were brought to bear upon them] 
the hystero-epileptics who fall instantly into and out of the 
proper convulsions or the proper trances when the proper 
stimulus is applied; those women again who <lr - on 

their arms or on other parts of the body for the purpos- 



258 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

fabricating extraordinary skin-diseases, or who blacken their 
eyelids in order to keep up the appearances of an illness 
which they feign, or are afflicted with a blindness or a 
speechlessness that vanishes with the restoration of moral 
sanity and will ; and many other similar cases too numerous 
to mention. 

If these persons are removed from the conditions of 
life in which their maladies had origin and afterwards grew 
to their present habits in response to the attention and 
sympathy bestowed upon them — the conditions, that is to 
say, to which their perverted moral natures have definitely 
adjusted themselves; and if they are placed in new sur- 
roundings where the social impressions are different and 
they feel they have no fitly sympathetic audience to act to, 
but on the contrary find themselves in presence of fit and 
firm moral influences brought steadily to bear upon them ; 
they speedily begin to make more wholesome adjustments 
and so regain their true moral tone and their natural power 
of will. For them, as a rule, the sympathy and interest of 
their family and friends are the most favourable audience, 
and therefore the most unfavourable environments, since they 
supply social sanction and support to the unmoral imperative 
of their perverted natures. Meanwhile the endurance they 
show in inflicting pain on themselves and in keeping up the 
more or less wilful deception, and the perverted pleasure 
that they feel in harassing their friends with the alarm and 
anxieties that they occasion them, are a signal testimony to 
the essential part which the social medium has in the con- 
stitution of the individual's nature ; for in no case would 
they be so afflicted had they not a sympathetic medium. It 
is impossible to conceive hysteria attacking one who was 
not a social being, or one again who, Robinson Crusoe-like, 
was planted alone on an uninhabited island. Their example 
proves also how the derangement of the social sense leads 
naturally and inevitably to a deterioration of moral feeling 
and will : it is demoralisation following desocialisation. 

Another lesson we cannot help learning from them ia 
how helpless a purely psychological theory leaves us in a 
case where it suffices not to have only words that sound 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 259 

rather than signify; for assuredly it yields not, nor even 
pretends to yield, the least explanation of the impairment of 
will — how it has come about, what are its nature and extent, 
and how it is to be got rid of. Is it that the will's essence 
is affected, or is it that, perfectly pure and unimpaired 
itself, its manifestations are hindered and lamed by 
obstructed nerve-paths? Are we to look upon the will 
itself as in fault, or are we to look compassionately upon a 
faultless will struggling in vain with a defective instru- 
ment? The psychologist of the study does not trouble 
himself to answer in that matter, but the medical psycho- 
logist who has to deal practically with disorders of will and 
to bring them back to order, if possible, cannot pass the 
question by : he must do as mankind with consistent incon- 
sistency have always done actually, in spite of their theory 
of the spiritual separateness of will — treat its derangements 
through the body exactly as if it were entirely dependent on 
the body, product not prime mover. 

In order not to delude himself with words that mark no 
definite ideas, but to have substantial meaning in the terms 
he uses, he must learn to fall back upon the physiological 
conception of a number of confederated nerve-centres, co- 
ordinate and sub-ordinate, as the physical substrata of all 
mental functions. To him, as he then conceives matters, 
the just co-ordination of these confederated centres will be 
seen to be the essential condition of will, and the completest 
co-ordination the condition of the best will; which nowise 
therefore predetermines and effects the process, as the 
common illusion is, but by its being marks and attests the 
accomplishment thereof. Now in these hysterical persons, 
whose extreme mobility of nature shows itself at the best 
of times by rapid transitions of moods, notions, and caprices 
according to the different impressions which the}- undergo, 
there is a certain instability in the confederation of nerve- 
centres; that is to say, instead of being bound together 
firmly in compact association these are prone to easy dis- 
sociation in consequence of moderate disturbance, whether 
moral or physical, and to take on more or less separate 
action. It is such dissociate function that is the disinte- 



260 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

gration of will and the deserialisation of the individual. 
Any one who is brought under the dominion of the pre- 
dominant or exclusive activity of one of these centres or of 
an allied group of them, the functions of the rest being 
inhibited and perhaps almost completely suspended for the 
time, is necessarily an incomplete and changed being ; 
not an integrate self but absorbed as self in the special and 
partial function, and insensible therefore to those relations 
to which the other centres separately or in the imperial 
union of the whole minister: mentally disintegrate and 
therefore morally deteriorate. The consensus gone, the con- 
science goes with it. The condition of things is of the same 
kind as, though much less deep in degree than, that which 
seems to exist, reaching its climax, in such discontinuous 
mental states as hypnotism, somnambulism, catalepsy and 
other allied disorders. 

Similar considerations will apply to those hysterical con- 
ditions, not calling for description here, in which socially 
morbid impulses are exhibited sometimes by young women 
— especially when they are somewhat weak-minded, or have 
inherited a distinct predisposition to mental derangement — 
who have lately passed through the physiological changes 01 
puberty : for example, impulses to steal, to set fire to houses, 
to make false accusations of indecent assaults, and even 
sometimes to kill. When, in consequence of those changes, 
the newly awakened functions of the reproductive organs 
come into action and enter into the mental life through their 
representative centres in the brain, they produce a commo- 
tion there which is the commencement of a revolution of the 
entire mental being ; and if the nerve-centres are unstable, it 
easily happens that their equilibrium is overthrown, and that 
instead of compactly associate function of the whole, a dis- 
sociate and predominant function of one centre or group of 
centres is set up. 

The odd thing from the psychological point of view is that 
all these hysterical persons are cured best by moral means ; 
that a vigorous moral shock or a suitable moral discipline is 
the most effective agent that can be applied ; that the physical 
disorder of the confederate centres is removed and the unity 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 261 

of their function restored by operating upon that spiritual 
agent in the background which, according to the psycholo- 
gical theory, has no point of contact or relation with them. 
Always, however, is the psychologist willing, notwithstanding 
his theory of their absolute separateness, to admit the power 
of mind over body more readily than the power of body over 
mind: it is only in the one direction that he desires the 
great gulf which he places between them to be impassable. 
From the physiological point of view it is not strange at all 
that the social nature incorporate in the individual nature 
responds to the proper social stimuli, and that when the 
dormant or suspended energies of the inhibited centres are 
aroused the energy of the predominantly active centre is 
withdrawn or inhibited; the excitation of a neighbouring 
centre is the diversion of energy from the active centre ; the 
restoration of the normal equilibrium the destruction of the 
morbid equilibrium. 

Another disease which effaces moral feeling temporarily, 
and even shatters moral character sometimes, especially in 
young children, is epilepsy. Somehow, though we cannot 
tell how, the exquisitely fine and complex organisation of 
nerve-structure is damaged by the intense molecular com- 
motion which is the condition of the epileptic explosion. 
Perhaps it is that the fine nervous substrata of this supreme 
organisation are so exhausted by the discharge, the principal 
trait of which is the violation or the abolition of normal co- 
ordination, that they are unable immediately, and in some 
cases ever, to recover their inhibitive powers and so to take 
their proper part in the co-ordinations and sub-ordinations 
of function. It is in that case a sort of paralysis of function 
following convulsion. Undoubtedly it has happened that a 
child's conscience has been as clean effaced after a suo 
sion of epileptic convulsions as the memory is effaced some- 
times in like manner ; and in that case the child is made by 
morbid art very much like the child that is by nature OOn- 
genitally destitute of moral sense. Those who see much of 
epilepsy are witnesses of equally remarkable moral transfor- 
mations in connection with the seizures in the adult ; the 
changes either preceding or following the tits or in some 



262 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

instances occurring in their stead. Looking first on this 
and then on that picture of the person in the two states, it 
is hard to realise that they are pictures of the same person. 
Perhaps the change goes no deeper than an exceeding irri- 
tability and suspicion and an extreme aptness to take offence 
where not the least offence was meant or given, but in other 
instances it is so great as to amount almost to a transforma- 
tion of character : suspicion, surliness, indolence, irascibility, 
and a disposition to false accusations and vicious deeds 
taking the place of candour, amiability, good temper, an 
obliging disposition and gentle behaviour. Happily the 
abrupt change is mostly a passing phase : it might be com- 
pared well to that which takes place when a clear and 
cloudless sky is overcast suddenly with dark and threatening 
thunder- clouds ; and just as the darkened sky is cleared by 
the thunderstorm which it portends, so the gloomy moral 
perturbation is discharged sometimes by the epileptic fit or 
fits, and the mental atmosphere cleared, the patient returning 
soon to his natural character. Not always, however : for 
the effect of a continued epilepsy, especially in children, may 
be a permanent deterioration of moral character ; the func- 
tional impairment, when unremoved, lapsing by degrees into 
structural impairment. Be that as it may, the fact is plain 
that a physical cause of some kind, deranging the fine, in- 
tricate, and probably unstable organisation which subserves 
the highest functions of mind — those, namely, of moral feel- 
ing and will, abolishes temporarily those functions. 

A similar derangement of moral feeling and will may 
follow the shock of jan attack of acute mania in a young 
person of fourteen or fifteen years of age, especially if it be 
in a person who, inheriting a predisposition to insanity, 
has unstable nerve-centres. The order of events is in this 
wise : after the abatement of the acute excitement there is 
apparent recovery, for the intellect regains its clearness and 
sharpness in the ordinary relations of life, but there is not a 
concomitant return to the normal moral character ; on the 
contrary, a persisting moral alienation shows itself in ex- 
treme self-conceit, impudence, indolence, deceit, wilfulness, 
even violence ; therewith a complete moral insusceptibility, 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 203 

so that, though knowing right from wrong well enough, he 
is not impressional to good influence, likes and does the 
wrong, and evinces no desire to suit his conduct to his know- 
ledge. The social self in him is extinguished. A plain 
proof this, if proof were necessary, that a keen intellectual 
apprehension of right and wrong is useless to generate a 
good will without the inspiring and driving force of good 
feeling. In any case there is very little altruistic feeling in 
the mind of a boy or girl before puberty, for which reason 
an alienation of mind before that great physiological event 
has taken place and brought about its resulting evolution 
of new thought, feeling and desire, usually presents many 
features of moral derangement ; still in all healthily consti- 
tuted beings of civilised parentage there is a certain moral 
germ or capability on which education works ; and that it is 
which has been damaged or destroyed by the storm of the 
mania. The interpretation of matters is something of this 
kind : a natural instability of the supreme nerve-centres, the 
ill-boding gift of inheritance ; easy and complete overthrow 
of their unstable equilibrium in the excitement of the mania, 
which in such case breaks out on a comparatively slight oc- 
casion and passes quickly into extreme incoherence ; incom- 
plete restoration of normal stability after the subsidence of 
the mental storm ; a consequent impairment or extinction 
of the most fine inhibitive functions, which means an in- 
capacity to bring the highest regulating ideas and feelings 
to bear upon the lower feelings and impulses. 

The dissolution of the union of the federated supreme 
nerve-centres may of course take place without evident statical 
or structural disorder — may, that is to say, be purely func- 
tional in the first instance ; all that has happened is that a 
mental equilibrium somewhat unstable naturally has fallen 
into a temporarily more stable equilibrium of an abnormal or 
morbid kind. In all forms of mental derangement there arc 
two underlying pathological conditions: the one dynamical, 
being a functional dissociation or severance of the nerve- 
centres that have been organised to act together physiologi- 
cally, whence naturally for the time being an incoherence of 
function and a discontinuity of individual being ; the other 



264 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

statical, consisting in a structural change in the nerve-cells 
or in their uniting fibre, whence a permanent disintegration 
of the substance of ideas. The physiological order of de- 
velopment is association and then integration of ideas, the 
pathological order of degeneration is dissociation and then 
disintegration of them. I am not prepared to say which 
condition of things obtains in the child whose moral sense 
has been destroyed by an attack of madness — whether, that 
is to say, the main trouble is an interruption of the bonds of 
association, a dissolution of partnership, so to speak, or 
whether some minute structural change in the nerve-elements 
that no microscope can detect has been produced ; but in any 
case the former condition, in which patient and systematic 
training, intellectual and moral, might work a cure, is obvi- 
ously a less serious mischief than the latter, in which it is 
hard to believe that a cure could ever be effected. Note by 
the way, that in using the term instability of mental organ- 
isation one may, conformably to the foregoing theory of 
pathology, properly distinguish two conditions : (a) an insta- 
bility of the association or federation of centres, whereby 
they are prone to dissociate function ; and (b) an instability 
of the nervous molecule itself, whereby it is prone to easy 
explosion. 

There are other conditions occurring in connection with 
the development of the reproductive system at puberty that 
may occasion a good deal of moral disorder, but I need not 
discuss them here. On physiological grounds one might 
venture to predict that to eliminate the sexual system and 
its intimate and essential mental workings from the consti- 
tution of human nature, would be to eradicate the vital 
principle of morality, of poetic and artistic emotion, of reli- 
gious feeling among mankind. Eunuchs, so far as informa- 
tion about them goes, lend strong support to the opinion, 
since they are for the most part deceitful, liars, cowardly, 
envious, malignant, destitute of social and moral feeling, 
mutilated in mind as in body ; l and it is> I think, still 

1 * Certainly there is a consent between the body and the mind ; and where 
Nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other. Ubi peccat in uno 
periclitatur in altero. . . . Kings in ancient times (and at this present in some 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 265 

further strengthened by observation of the mental and 
moral effects of the development of the reproductive system 
at puberty, and of the special features of the different forms 
of mental derangement that occur at different periods of 
life. What then shall be said of those holy men of old of 
whom we are told that they made themselves eunuchs for 
the kingdom of heaven's sake ? This certainly : that they 
emasculated virtue in order to escape from the temptations 
of vice; and that only would they find the kingdom of 
heaven a fitting place for them if the glorious company of 
angels, apostles, prophets, and holy men and women there 
were moral eunuchs. In our dealings with physical nature 
we conquer not except by obeying ; and so likewise in the 
conflict of the passions of our nature it is necessary to 
acknowledge and assimilate their true force and character, 
and so to get the best use of them, not by vain and foolish 
attempts to extinguish them as mortal enemies, but by wise 
and patient efforts to turn and guide and use their forces in 
the path of a higher development. A castrated chastity is 
a chastity without contents, neither virtue nor vice in any 
character. The holiness of Heaven postulates the root- 
passions of Hell. 

The next examples of moral degeneracy to claim notice 
are those that are met with often at the commencement of 
mental alienation, before the person is so far deranged as to 
be deemed positively insane. Almost eveiy kind of mental 
disorder begins with a moral alienation, not very marked 
perhaps at the outset, but so thorough after a time in some 
cases that a person may seem the opposite of what he was 
in feeling and conduct. Then the hidden potentialities of 
his nature reveal themselves in a sad and startling develop- 
ment. In place of diffidence and self-restraint we 
exhibited a bold and presumptuous address; in place of 
refined manners and modest conversation, coarse behaviour 
and indelicate allusions; in place of chaste and decent con- 

countrios) were wont to put groat trust in etmuoha : because they thai 
envious towards all are more obnoxious and officious towards one. But 
their trust towards them hath rather been as to good spials and good « 
perer?, than good magistrates and offl won, flwij f >>n D'/ormity. 

18 



266 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

duct, indecency and even open lasciviousness ; in place of 
prudence in business, foolhardiness in speculation ; in place 
of candour and honourable dealing, duplicity, guile, and 
even vicious and criminal tendencies: — these are the trans- 
formations that are witnessed in different cases. Moreover, 
this moral alienation, which is manifest before there is 
positive intellectual derangement, accompanies the latter 
throughout its course, and may last for a while after all dis- 
order of intelligence has gone; it is the truer and deeper 
derangement, being a derangement of character; and 
therefore it is notoriously not safe to count the recovery of 
a person sure and stable until he has returned to the senti- 
ments and affections of his natural character. 

Here then we perceive plainly that when the mind under- 
goes degeneration the moral feeling is the first to show it, as 
it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away : 
the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the 
first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution : the 
first effect of mental degeneration, it is the last to witness to 
full mental regeneration. In undoing a mental organisation 
nature begins by unravelling the finest, most delicate, most 
intricately woven and last completed threads of her mar- 
vellously complex network. Were the moral sense as old 
and firmly fixed an instinct as the instinct to walk upright 
or the more deeply planted instinct of propagation, as many 
people in the presumed interests of morality have tried to 
persuade themselves and others that it is, it would not be 
the first to suffer in this way when mental degeneration 
begins; its categorical imperative would not take instant 
flight at the first assault but would assert its authority at a 
later period of the decline ; but being the last acquired and 
least fixed, it is most likely to vary, not only, as I have 
shown, in the pathological way of degeneracy, but also, as 
might be shown abundantly, in physiological ways, according 
to the diversities of conditions in which it is placed. Like 
all forming organic matter, it is plastic and exhibits a cir- 
cumstance-suiting power; and therefore it varies in its 
sanctions in different nations, societies, sects, castes, indi- 
viduals in a way that a thoroughly formed and fixed instinct, 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 267 

like the instinct to walk upright, does not. Why should 
not a savage steal when he wants food, or kill his mother 
when she is old and useless, or sell his sister's children, 
since it seems the most natural and proper thing in the 
world to him ? 'Tis the categorical imperative of his 
practical reason, the instinct of right in him. 

In this relation the most interesting form of mental 
disease perhaps is that which is known in medicine as 
general paralysis ; interesting because it is usually accom- 
panied with a signal paralysis of moral sense from the out- 
set, and because we can trace nearly from their first 
beginnings morbid changes in the brain going along with 
the decay of mental and motor powers. Not exact and 
complete relations, it is true, but such broad general rela- 
tions as warrant the belief of exact and complete relations ; 
while towards the end, when the waning mental and motor 
functions are well-nigh extinct, there is plain evidence of 
waste and destruction of nerve-elements suiting well with 
the decrepit functions. At the beginning of the disease 
the prominent mental symptoms in the most typical cases 
are those of deterioration of moral sense and will ; the 
earliest derangement of all being a great exaltation of ideas 
and feelings and will very like that which characterises the 
early stages of alcoholic intoxication. Indeed, it is an 
example that may help us to a conception of the physical 
nature of the initial process of a moral derangement. An 
active determination of blood accompanies an excessive 
action of the nerve-centres, the result of the agitation or 
commotion in them being an impairment of the interinhibi- 
tive functions ; and accordingly the individual cannot apply 
his mind closely and exactly to impressions, social or physi- 
cal, so as to get a real touch or hold of them and of their just 
relations to one another— that is to say, to apprehend and 
truly reflect them as they are. Thence flows the appearance 
of an egoistic disdain or disregard of them; all the more 
marked because the lower feelings of the excited and exalted 
self, which preserve the unity imparted to them by the 
organic life, assert themselves with an unaccustomed freedom 
from reserve. How indeed can the individual perceive 



268 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

properly the object and its relations if the group of centres 
that have been organised to act together in the perception 
of it, and the associate action of which is the perception, 
cannot combine as they should owing to commotion in them? 
And how can he, unperceiving the impressions justly, feel 
and act justly in relation to them ? The unity of his higher 
nature is more or less impaired by the excessive stimulation — 
its altruism suspended ; the unity of his lower nature remains 
and is made more self-assertive by it — its egoism exag- 
gerated. So it is perhaps that you get the moral impairment 
of incipient drunkenness and of the first stage of typical 
general paralysis. 

A not unfrequent feature of the moral deterioration of 
the disease, striking enough in some cases, is a persistent 
tendency to steal, the person stealing stupidly for the most 
part what he does not particularly want and perhaps makes 
no use of when he has stolen it. It is not uncommon 
therefore for those who are victims of the disease in its early 
stages to be sent to prison and treated there as criminals, 
notwithstanding that a duly skilled medical observer might 
be able to say, and perhaps does say, with entire certitude, 
from an appreciation of the physical and mental symptoms, 
that the supposed criminal was attacked by an organic 
disease of his brain which had destroyed his moral sense at 
the outset, which would go on to destroy the other faculties of 
his mind in succession, and which would end by destroying 
life itself. Not wickedness but disease is what we are really 
confronted with in that case ; and though with the imperfect 
instruments of research at our present command we cannot 
discern the actual minute structural changes which are the 
physical conditions of the deteriorations of character, and 
link them in an exact correspondence the one with the other, 
we feel none the less sure of their existence and of the un- 
failing correspondence. In the visible destructive changes 
that are patent after death we recognise the extreme patho- 
logical issues of the minute molecular changes which, though 
unseen, we are sure are there at the beginning. 

Note here and consider for a moment, in passing, the 
impulse to steal which is so marked a feature in some, 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 269 

though not in all, cases of general paralysis. Whence 
conies it? It would not be true to say that there is a 
hidden instinct to steal in all persons who fall victims to 
that disease, an instinct that is unveiled by its ravages, 
since all general paralytics do not exhibit it. But it is true 
that there is in every one a strong self-conservative instinct, 
which in the domain of complex social evolution shows 
itself in manifold secondary modes of self-preservation and 
self-aggrandisement. The information we need, and which 
must be set down as entirely wanting, is a full and exact 
previous history of the character of the individual who ex- 
hibits this symptom, in respect particularly of the strength 
and forms of his acquisitive tendencies, and the full and 
exact character-histories also of the members of his family, 
since in one or another of them we may perceive in full dis- 
play what lay in germ only in him. It is a close and rigid 
study of individual psychology that is wanting and is wanted ; 
for to learn, as we do perhaps in some cases, that insanity or 
another form of nervous disease existed in his ancestors, 
though a distinct advance on anything that pure psychology 
can tell us, is still knowledge so vague and general as to be 
of little more value than it would be to know that he was 
born when this or that planet was in the ascendant. Had 
we such exact histories at our service, and could we there- 
upon find our way through the complicated interactions, by 
tracing the orderly developments which undoubtedly exist 
in the seeming disorder, it is certain that we should discover 
the required explanation. The impulse to steal would 
perhaps be revealed as the pathological evolution of strong 
or strongly self-regarding acquisitive impulses in that family 
nature. 

More than a mere knowledge of the family bent of 
nature, however, would be needed in any case : in order to 
understand fully the varieties of moral derangement* it 
would be necessary to study them in relation to (a) tho 
exact character of the individual as it has been formed 
by inheritance and training ; (b) the particular disinte- 
gration of it by disease, according to the deg [tent 
and particular character of the disease — that is to say, its 



270 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

special morbid range and the special damage it has done ; 
and (c) the subsequent pathological developments of the dis- 
integrate character ; which may be of little moment in some 
cases, as in general paralysis, where the severity of the 
organic disease, entailing a mental destruction, precludes 
them, but of great importance in other cases, as for example 
in chronic hereditary insanity, where there is no such 
hindrance to the developments of morbid or degenerate 
varieties of human nature. Let no one then at any time 
deceive himself by laying the evil impulses within him to the 
charge of a devil or any other external principle of evil, but 
let him rather search diligently for the source of them in 
himself and in his ancestral antecedents, and endeavour 
patiently to eradicate them in himself and in his posterity. 

Here let us pause for a moment in order to mark the 
ground which has thus far been gained and to see where 
we now stand. It was shown first, being set down as a 
fact of observation, that mental derangement in one gene- 
ration is sometimes the cause of an innate deficience or 
absence of moral sense in the succeeding generation, the 
child bearing the burden of ancestral depravation in a con- 
genital deprivation ; and we now place by the side of that 
statement this second observation — that moral feeling, the 
finest flower of social evolution, is the first function of mind 
to be affected at the beginning of mental derangement in the 
individual. Thus it appears that an absence or impairment 
of moral sense marks the way of degeneracy in the individual 
and through generations : as man begins to go to pieces, 
alike as individual, as family, as society, as nation, as 
humanity, the moral feeling goes : the last to inspire him it 
is the first to expire in him. 

The next examples of marred moral character and will 
to which I call attention are those which sometimes follow 
injuries of the head. It happens in these cases after an in- 
jury that may or may not have caused immediate symptoms 
of a serious nature, that slow degenerative changes are set 
up in the brain, which go on in an insidious way for months 
or years and produce first great irritability, then little by 
little a weakening, and eventually a destruction of mind. 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 271 

The person who appears perhaps to be all right soon aft.-r 
his accident turns out to be all wrong, and irretrievably 
wrong, years after it. Now the instructive matter is that 
the moral character is usually impaired first in these cases, 
and in some of them is completely perverted without a corre- 
sponding deterioration of the understanding. The injury has 
given rise to disorder in the most delicate part of the mental 
organisation, the part which is only separated from actual 
contact with the internal surface of the skull by the thin 
investing membranes of the brain ; and once this delicate 
organisation has been seriously damaged, it is seldom that it 
is ever restored completely to its former state of soundness. 
The first symptom to attract notice is a change of temper 
and disposition for the worse, the most fine sensibilities and 
the highest inhibitive functions having been plainly impaired. 
He is easily and unduly excitable, especially by alcohol, a 
little of which will produce a great effect, perhaps rendering 
him actually insane for the time its effects last ; he is prone 
to outbreaks of anger which mount almost to outbreaks of 
maniacal fury ; may indulge in excesses that are quite 
foreign to his natural character ; a moderate fever or other 
inflammatory disorder will give rise to delirium ; he is easily 
exhausted by mental exertion to which he finds himself un- 
equal ; is incapable of systematic and steady application. 
The meaning of these symptoms is that the co-ordination uf 
the supreme mind-centres has been so weakened by tbeir dis- 
order, their equilibrium rendered so unstable, that it is easily 
overthrown by causes that would have no such effect upon a 
sound mental organisation. As matters get worse, an in- 
creasing loss of memory and other symptoms of mental 
decay show themselves, and the course of events is pretty 
regularly, or with intercurrence of acute mania and perhaps 
epileptic fits, to dementia— the term of the morbid degene- 
ration. 

Here it will be proper to take particular note of tli<> sig- 
nificant fact that one whose mental organisation lias been 
lamed by injury to the head in the way just described is, at 
the commencement of the trouble, very much like in general 
temper and quality of mind one who has inherited a distinct 



272 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

tendency to insanity : his weakened brain is brought to an 
unstable state very much like that which the latter has in- 
herited naturally. Easy excitability, especially by alcohol, 
outbursts of passion that overflow into torrents of incoherent 
fury, sudden and passing, delirium lighted by a moderate 
fever or by other causes which would be inadequate ordi- 
narily to produce that effect — these and the like are signs of 
weak inhibitive powers of the higher social or moral sort ; 
the natural result of such weakness being the indulgence of 
egoistic tendencies, anti-social in their operation, and an 
ever-increasing mischief as habit makes the way of disorder 
easier and the return to order harder. Later on more shall 
be said concerning the qualities of a brain whose temper has 
the flaw of a predisposition to degenerate mental function ; 
at present I desire only to note the resemblance between it 
and the brain that has been damaged by the effects of 
violence. Assuredly passion and prudence, self-control and 
reflection, right and wrong, even pleasure and pain have 
very differeut meanings to a person so constituted or so 
maimed morally from what they have to one who has no 
reason whatever to blame either inheritance or accident. 

To discuss at length the abstract question whether pleasure 
is the aim of human conduct seems to be hardly a more fruit- 
ful procedure than it would be to discnss whether stockings 
are the aim of human feet. I suppose if mankind had not 
practically felt it a proper aim to pursue pleasure and to shun 
pain they would not have invented Heaven as a place to be 
aspired to, and Hell as a place to be recoiled from ; a reflec- 
tion which may be allowed to settle the abstract question for 
us here. Certainly a prior obligation that would properly 
lie upon us before we made the attempt to ascend into the 
high regions of abstract discussion would be to find a solid 
standing ground in a concrete study of the particular indi- 
vidual and his particular likings and dislikings, pleasures 
and pains, as determined by natural temper, training, age, 
constitutional state and the like ; for certain it is that one 
man's pleasures are another man's pains, and that the same 
person may find very bitter at fifty years of age what he 
relished acutely at twenty- five. Moreover, if pleasure, is it 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. '273 

immediate or distant, seeing that it depends on the individual's 
foresight whether he looks beyond the moment, or the hour, 
or the day, or the year? And, if distant, is it minutes, years, 
or centuries distant, since the direct pleasure of the moment 
may be a sacrifice of self to an unborn posterity ? To settle 
abstractly whether pleasure is or is not the end of human 
conduct is very much like settling the question after it has 
been emptied of its contents. 

Thus far it has been shown that moral feeling and will 
are impaired or destroyed by degeneration going on through 
generations, by the disorganising effects of disease, and by 
direct physical injury to the brain. I now go on to point 
out that the same effects are produced by the chemical 
action of certain substances which, when taken in excess, are 
poisons to the nervous system — by the abuse of such nerve- 
stimulating and nerve-narcotising substances as alcohol and 
opium. Nowhere is to be found a more miserable specimen 
of degradation of moral feeling and of impotence of will than 
is presented by the person who has become the abject slave 
of either of these pernicious indulgences. His finest moral 
sensibilities are extinguished and his least fine blunted: 
steadily sensitive to his own selfish wants and persistent to 
gratify them, he is insensible to the feelings and claims of 
his family whose dearest interests he sacrifices without real 
compunction, and indifferent to the obligations and responsi- 
bilities of his social position ; he will often profess you very 
fine sentiments, and perhaps indulge in the pleasant debau- 
chery of a visionary imagination inspired by intensely egoistic 
feeling and stimulated by the drug, but uncontrolled by reali- 
ties, the disciplinary and disagreeable hold of which the drug 
has deadened or destroyed ; for the most part he is untruth- 
ful and untrustworthy, and in the worst end there is not a 
meanness of pretence or of conduct he will not descend to, 
not a lie he will not tell, not a degradation he will not undergo, 
scarce a fraud he will not perpetrate, in order to gratify 
his absorbing craving. It is not enough to say that passion 
is strengthened and will weakened by indulgence, as a moral 
effect: that is so no doubt, but beneath that effect there liei 
the deeper fact of a physical deterioration of nerve-element ; 



274 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

for the alcohol and the opium enter the blood, are carried 
by it to the inmost minute recesses of the brain, and act 
there injuriously upon the elements of the exquisitely deli- 
cate structures. So its finest, latest organised, least stable 
parts which subserve moral feeling and supreme will are 
marred. Vain is it to preach reformation to one who has 
brought himself into this damnable predicament; if any 
good is to be done with him he must be restrained forcibly 
from his besetting vice for a long enough time to allow the 
brain to get rid of the poison, which it will do pretty soon, 
and its tissues to recover their healthy tone, which they will 
take a long time to do, if they ever do. Moreover, the tis- 
sues have sometimes had the congenital misfortune to begin 
with the original taint of a depraved tone; they have in- 
herited the proclivity to drink, it is ingrained in their nature; 
and once the craving is stirred it is kindled quickly by gra- 
tification into uncontrollable desire. 

There is nothing pleasant in the taste of alcohol or of 
opium — at any rate in the first instance before experience 
of their pleasing mental effects has associated that pleasure 
with the experience of the means to it, and so, by a fusion of 
the pleasure of the end with the means, produced a vitiation 
of the natural taste — to make men betake themselves to 
them so eagerly as they do all over the world. This eager 
use running headlong into abuse is evidence of the longing 
that there is in human nature for the ideal ; for an elation 
of feeling, an expansion of sympathy, a freedom of mental 
power, an exaltation of the whole nature, mental and bodily, 
are obtained thereby which are denied to it by the real. The 
low savage does not care for the taste of rum, but once he 
has had the ideal opened to him by feeling the exhilarating 
effects of it he will sacrifice everything he possesses, even 
his last blanket, to procure it, and abandon himself unre- 
strainedly to its effects whenever he has the opportunity ; so 
that there is no surer way of initiating and hastening the 
decline and extinction of savage races than by the introduc- 
tion of alcohol among them. 1 Herein we see a curious proof 

1 Except perhaps to bring them into contact with civilisation, and to 
expect them to conform to its usages ! To impose regularity and constraint on 



MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 27o 

of the wide gap that there is between the lowest human 
being and the highest animal, for no animal, except perhaps 
here and there a monkey or an elephant, appears to have 
such a taste of the ideal kindled in it by alcohol as to over- 
come the repugnance of its natural taste. When it is made 
a reproach to the drunkard that he degrades himself in a 
way which no brute ever does, he may claim that as proof of 
his higher capacity and higher aspiration, confessing how- 
ever, if he be penitent enough, to a cultivation of the ideal in 
a wrong fashion. Were he mere brute he would be content, 
like it, to live in the gratifications of his senses : it is because 
he has higher yearnings in him that he is dissatisfied with 
the real of sense, craves a compensating ideal of the imagina- 
tion, and creates it for himself either as drunken bliss, or as 
a vision of earthly grandeur in some shape or other, or as a 
life of eternal happiness in the world to come — a house not 
made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Pessimism in fact 
supplemented by optimism in theory — such the eternal plan 
of human life ; wherefore the two rules of it come finally to 
be, according to the dark or bright ground-tone of the indi- 
vidual's nature, according as it is instinct with the hard logic 
of reason or animated with the warm hope of imagination 
Ilfaut cultiver notre jardin, and Ilfaut cultiver notre ideal. 

natures that demand lawless liberty ; to create in them wants which they 
have not and which they think you strangely contemptible for having ; to 
attempt to instil abstract thoughts and moral feeling into beings whose lan- 
guage is a vehicle incapable of conveying them, who have only sensations and 
few, simple, and mean ideas, and who practise a gross sensualism ; — what is it 
but to break up the foundations of their mental being ? To beings of so low 
and simple a mental organisation Christianity is a disintegrant — as pernicious 
almost as alcohol. 



276 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

SECTION rv. 

THE MOEAL SENSE AND WILL IN CRIMINALS. 

Habitual criminals are a class of beings whose lives are 
sufficient proof of the absence or great bluntness of moral 
sense. It is the common experience and common testimony 
of those who have much to do with these antisocial varieties 
of the human kind that a certain proportion of them are of 
distinctly weak intellect, albeit not sufficiently so to warrant 
their seclusion in asylums as idiots or imbeciles. They 
abound among vagrants, partly from a restless disposition 
and an inability to apply themselves to steady and 
systematic work, and partly because they do not easily find 
or keep employment. They are addicted to petty thefts, to 
acts of wanton mischief, and, much more so than the 
criminals that are not of such plainly low organisation, to 
arson, to sexual offences, and even to homicide. The ex- 
ternal conditions of civilised life are too fine and complex 
for their blunt and defective capacities, and they are unable 
to adjust themselves to them so as to procure the gratifica- 
tion of their propensities or even the means of living ; hence 
it is that, urged by their instincts and impatient of restraints 
whose nature they are incapable of appreciating, they are 
prone to explode in some criminal act. Sometimes they are 
provoked to a passionate act of violence by those who tease 
or otherwise irritate them ; sometimes they are impelled to 
imitate a crime of which they have read or heard spoken ; 
sometimes they are used designedly as instruments by 
criminals of stronger intellect whom they look up to with a 
sort of respect. Their fate is indeed a hard one. Congenital 
outcasts from the social organisation by the preordination 
of the society that has produced them, it is nevertheless 
demanded of them that they should conform to the laws 
of a body of which they are not a part, but from which they 
are apart; and they natuially fall back upon the inalienable 
right of the individual to be : that right of which no one 
can be deprived or deprive himself, quo nemo cedere potest, as 



MORAL SENSE AND WILL IN CRIMINALS. 277 

Spinoza says — the right, that is to say, to live and to pursue 
the means to live. 

In prison they prove troublesome to the officials, partly 
because of their irritable moods and small self-control, and 
partly because other prisoners, taking advantage of their 
weakness, instigate them to acts of insubordination. They 
will generally listen respectfully to the admonitions of the 
chaplain and express readily and superabundantly the 
penitence which he solicits ; one of them, for example, of whom 
Dr. Guy makes mention, confessed to as many as five 
murders which he had never committed ; but they have no 
real sense of the wickedness of their doings, feel no true 
remorse, are incapable of genuine penitence. Their de- 
fective natures will not take the stamp of virtue. Their 
lives therefore are spent in alternations of long periods in 
and of short periods out of prison; for after undergoing 
their punishment for some offence or other they are dis- 
charged at the expiration of their sentences, and, soon 
committing crime again, are soon convicted again. Prison 
officials who perceive them to be mentally weak and irre- 
claimable, and know how surely they will resort to their 
criminal ways when they are free, would gladly see a way to 
some means of detaining them in a special establishment at 
the end of their terms of punishment or immediately after 
conviction, but as they cannot certify them to be actually 
insane or imbecile in the legal sense no such protec- 
tion is given. Some of them are epileptic, and others of 
them have sprung from families in which epilepsy, insanity, 
or some allied neurosis exists. Malformed or deformed in 
part or whole of body, with irregular and bad conformation 
of head and face — that has been the representation of 
criminals by sculptors and painters at all times ; and it may 
justly be taken to be the intuition of experience, the con- 
solidated result of observation that the organisation of the 
wicked is commonly defective. Pity it is that no better 
is made of beings so mal-orgauised as to be utterly incapable 
of moral sensibility and therefore of repentance and reform, 
than to punish them with sufferings which do them no good, 
and after that to turn them loose again upon society in 



278 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

which they can make no living room for themselves except 
by crime. It is as if the bodily organism, having bred a 
morbid element which by its nature could not take part in 
the healthy physiological life, but must cause disorder of it 
by its presence, were not solicitous to get rid of it altogether 
by excretion or to render it harmless by isolation in a 
morbid capsule or in a special morbid area, but were to 
launch it again and again after each brief period of isolation 
among the elements of the healthy structures in order to 
generate new disorder. To educate them is not to improve 
them, it is simply to render them more dangerous. 

Weak as these habitual criminals sometimes are in 
understanding, it is instructive to observe how they consort 
together by an elective affinity and are united into a loosely 
gregarious society by bonds of a kind — for example, by the 
respect which the weaker has for the stronger criminal, by 
their mutual aid and defence against the common enemy on 
which they prey, by the secrecy which they have to preserve, 
by the thieves' honour which they show in the division of 
spoils, and by the like tacit leagues : a society that they 
would not keep up, since they would never conform willingly 
to any code, but for the constant pressure and always mena- 
cing danger from without. In these rude rudiments of morals 
they yield us an incidentally instructive example of a moral 
sense in the making, for they consider it entirely wrong to 
do to one another what they do not think it in the least 
wrong to do to society as a whole ; not otherwise than as, 
according to the moral code of the Old Testament, * Thou 
shalt not kill ' and ' Thou shalt not steal,' having a specially 
tribal application, did not mean, <Thou shalt not kill a 
Canaanite ' and ' Thou shalt not spoil an Egyptian.' 

A class of people who, congenitally destitute of moral 
sense, have not the sensibilities to feel and respond to im- 
pressions of a moral kind, any more than one who is colour- 
blind has sensibility to certain colours — ought to be deeply 
interesting to the metaphysical psychologist, who, however, 
has strangely ignored them in the construction of his philo- 
sophical theories. They are apt instances to prove to him 
that if, as he alleges, the moral sense has not been acquired 



MORAL SENSE AND WILL IN CRIMINALS. 279 

in the process of natural evolution, but infused by a super- 
natural inspiration, it may at any rate be degraded and lost 

by the operations of natural law in a process of human de- 
generation. Degenerate varieties of the kind who would 
have to be regenerate in order to be fit for any true social 
use, they mark the categorical imperative of the moral sense 
brought down to zero. What more important and helpful to 
him in the construction of a moral scale from positive data 
than to have the zero thus definitely fixed ? Unfortunately 
they have not yet been made the subject of exact and positive 
inquiry, although I cannot doubt that a thorough and com- 
plete scientific study of one such person, and of the ante- 
cedent conditions of his being, making manifest how he 
had come, what exactly he was, and what was the social 
meaning of him, would be more instructive than all the 
scholastic disquisitions concerning the moral sense that have 
been put forth by ambitious thinkers. It is in truth sad 
to reflect that no scientific use is made of the abundant 
material for practical studies in psychology which our prisons 
contain, and that when the world is startled by some 
atrocious crime, and shocked by the subsequent exhibition 
of an entire moral insensibility in its perpetrator, it thinks 
it has done enough when it has uttered a loud howl of re- 
probation and insisted on his being put out of the world cl- 
out of the way. The makers and administrators of law ought 
really to have some pity for these defective beings suffering, 
as they do, under an irremediably bad organisation ; but so 
far are they from showing compassion for them that they 
punish them angrily, not with the hope of reforming them, 
seeing that experience has proved that to be impossible, nor 
with the hope of warning and improving others like them, 
seeing that their special examples can be no benefit to those 
who, defectively organised like them, are equally beyond 
remedy, but in retaliation for what they have mad.' BOCiety 
suffer by their wrong-doings. Therein, though they cannot 
plead the warrant of philosophy, they rightly plead an imita- 
tion of the Divine exemplar who, claiming vengeance U his 
own, has given it full play in the infliction of eternal punish- 
ment: the institution of infinite torture, paradox as it seems. 



280 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

being the necessary and logical result of God's infinite love 
for Himself. 1 

So much for the victims of a bad organisation who are 
urged into crime by instincts whose natural restraints are 
wanting, whatever their circumstances of life, and are not to 
be reformed by instruction, or by example, or by correction. 
Another class of criminals, standing at the opposite end of 
the scale to them, comprise those who, not being positively 
criminally disposed by nature, have yet fallen into crime in 
consequence of a gradually increased or a suddenly inflicted 
pressure of adverse circumstances. They were probably 
much like hundreds of persons who have never overstepped 
the conventional line between their trade-morality and 
acknowledged crime, but they were so unfortunate in the 
changes and chances of life as to be exposed to suddenly 
urgent or to insidiously sapping temptation ; and they 
succumbed. Plainly they had not the best moral fibre, or 
they would have stood firm in resisting whatever temptation 
they were exposed to, but they were not worse endowed in 
that respect than many who, by reason of more fortunate 
circumstances, have escaped a similar adverse stress and 
fate. A great deal of the virtue of life is owing to the 
absence of the fit provocation to vice ; if among a hundred 
women one commits adultery, may we not safely say that 
there are some of the ninety-nine others who would have 
done the same in the same circumstances ? 

Between the two classes of criminals mentioned, the 
nature-made and the circumstance-made criminal, will come 
a third class comprising those who, having some degree of 
criminal disposition, would have been saved from crime had 
they enjoyed the advantages of a good training and of 
favourable surroundings, instead of growing up without 
education and amidst criminal surroundings. The circum- 
stance-suiting faculty of the brain adapts itself readily to 
the criminal atmosphere and grows to that mode of exercise. 
And in this relation it certainly ought not to be forgotten 
that there is education and education, and that it is small 
profit to teach a child the distance of the sun from the earth, 

1 See an article in the Month of January 1882, by the Kev. Father Clark. 



MORAL SENSE AND WILL IN CRIMINALS. 281 

if it be not taught at the same time to know, and not taught 
to know only but trained to feel, the distance between its 
higher and lower natures. 

This division of criminals into three classes serves well 
for convenience of apprehension, but of course they are 
not thus separated by actual divisions in nature ; on the 
contrary, they are united by all varieties of intermediate 
cases ; degrees of difference of moral strength in different 
individuals being as constant and as common as different 
degrees of intelligence. To apportion responsibility exactly 
according to deserts would be a task exceeding the re- 
sources of human justice ; but to attribute the same 
measure of moral capacity to all persons is to accuse divine 
justice, which has ordained things far otherwise. Meanwhile 
it is not a little curious to reflect that while all the world 
entertains more or less pity for the criminals of our second 
and third classes, making allowance for them as victims of 
unfortunate circumstances, it has no sort of pity for those of 
the first class, who are really the victims of a worse fate — 
the fate made for them by the tyranny of a bad organisa- 
tion. I suppose the reason of that is that they stir an in- 
stinct of repulsion, because, regarded from the standpoint 
of the human ideal, they are felt to be less human. But 
why, viewing the matter from a more detached standpoint, 
should a lame mind provoke any more anger than a lame 
body ? 

The foregoing reflections suffice to show that when man's 
nature is made the subject of serious study the instigation 
of the Devil is not an admissible explanation of its evil im- 
pulses ; that in all cases we must seek elsewhere for a natural 
cause of the effect defective. Nor is it again enough to think of 
such impulses as self-procreated in a spiritual entity, spring- 
ing up mysteriously in it from nowhere, and not legitimate 
subjects of scientific inquiry. Man will never truly realise 
the progress in self-improvement which he is capable of 
making, until he searches out exactly the laws by which bo 
has become what he is and uses his knowing systematically 
to make himself different. The problem is the same here 
it is in the lower sciences -prevision tor the purposes of 

19 



282 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

action : to observe in order to foresee, and to foresee in order 
to modify and direct. And the method to be employed is 
the same as that which has served so well in them — that is, 
the patient and diligent application of the method of obser- 
vation and induction. At one time it was the general 
belief that earthquakes, destructive storms, and other great 
physical calamities were the work of Satan ; the belief that 
lunatics were possessed with devils, who instigated their 
violent deeds, continued in vogue until quite a late period ; 
and it is still a belief in many quarters that the evil impulses 
of the wicked are inspired in them by the Devil, who by the 
loss of successive provinces in nature has now been driven 
to his last entrenchment in the human heart. And it seems 
likely that he will soon be driven out of that ; for as we 
search out diligently the causes of those great physical 
calamities of nature which were once thought to be of super- 
natural origin, and endeavour to prevent or to lessen by 
suitable means and appliances the damage which they do ; 
and as in like manner we inquire patiently into the nature 
of the diseases that afflict the insane and try to cure them ; 
so we have now to search and learn whether the evil spirit 
that is in the wicked man, who in the land of uprightness 
deals unjustly and will not turn away from his wickedness 
to learn righteousness and to do justly, is not the legacy of 
parental or other ancestral error, wrong-doing, misfortune, or 
vice. When that inquiry has been completed successfully, 
it is not improbable that the domain of the supernatural in 
human affairs will be yet further contracted ; but if it be 
actually extinguished mankind must bear the last great 
loss patiently, as they have borne the extinction of Mars and 
Minerva, of the miracle- worker and the astrologer, of the 
beliefs in witchcraft and in special supernatural interpositions 
to reverse natural laws. Meanwhile it is worth noting here 
that the theory of Satanic impulse was based upon a genuine 
recognition of facts in so far as it admitted a determination 
of the individual by a stronger power in himself than he 
could counteract, while it strove hard, ingeniously compro- 
mising matters, to save responsibility by ascribing to the 
individual the indulgence of the evil passions through which 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 283 

the Devil gained access to the citadel. It is the same old 
difficulty always coming back upon us in different guises 
and under different names : what part has determinism, 
what part freewill, in human doings ? 



SECTION V. 

DISORDERS OF WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 

It is a trite enough observation that nature does not show 
anywhere broad lines of demarcation, but makes everywhere 
easy passage from one class of things to another by gentle 
gradations, so that between the least things and the greatest 
a continuity exists throughout. It is we who make separate 
sciences, in consequence of the constitution of our faculties 
limiting our channels of apprehension to a few special points 
of contact with the external : we divide and classify in order 
to apprehend, making thus a sort of anatomy of nature. But 
inasmuch as we can only anatomise the dead, and as nature 
certainly is not dead and dividual but living and unity, we 
perforce sacrifice or lose much by these enforced divisions. 
Could we comprehend nature as a whole, which however 
intelligence co-extensive with it could alone do, the meanest 
things and the mightiest, the most like and the most unlike, 
the nearest and the most remote, all things great and small 
would be perceived to be bound together essentially as ele- 
ments of one mysterious whole. We should then perceive by 
an instantaneous intuition how necessary an issue of all the 
operations and changes of matter on earth from the begin- 
ning to now was any present act done there — the very act 
for example which I perform of writing the irord that I 
write at this moment—and foresee in it all the possible 
operations of matter in time to come. 

Between the most sanely constituted individual, compact 
of well-balanced moral feeling, understanding and will, and 
the ill-constituted individual whom all the world is agreed 
to pronounce mad, there are beings who make a line of human 



284 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

continuation from the one to the other: mediators they 
might be called, since a mediator must by virtue of being 
it share the natures of both the persons or classes between 
which he mediates. Near the borders of insanity then, yet 
not actually within them, we meet with persons some of 
whom it is not easy to classify : persons who in their modes 
of thought, feeling and will show marked peculiarities or 
positive eccentricities which make them remarked as unlike 
the ordinary run of men ; who have in fact an insane tem- 
perament — that is to say, a temperament of mind which be- 
speaks descent from a family in which insanity exists, which 
is itself a predisposition to insanity, and which betrays itself 
in odd departures from the common standard of social feeling 
and conduct. With the moral peculiarities go in extreme 
cases some peculiarities of bodily features and functions, such 
as ill-shaped or unsymmetrical head, ill-formed or deformed 
ears, squint, stutterings and stammerings, grotesquely dis- 
cordant expressions of face — one part of which perhaps looks 
serious while the rest is wreathed in smiles — extreme grim- 
acings, especially under the influence of excitement, and 
other nervous distortions of features that occasion disloca- 
tions of the ordinary harmonies of expression, and that are 
of the same nature as the dislocations of the muscular co- 
ordinations and of the ordinary associations of ideas; but in 
many cases there is nothing more noticeable in that respect 
than a specially marked stamp of physiognomy which has 
been fashioned by the mood-marking muscles of facial expres- 
sion. In the lines and play of their features, in fact, and 
often also in the carriage, attitudes and gestures of body, 
one sees moulded the predominant traits of their moral 
character. 

Without going into details which, suitable enough in a 
treatise on mental pathology, would be unsuitable here, 1 we 
find, when we inquire what are the broad features of this 
unsoundly leavened mental temperament, that they mark, 
first, a partial degeneration or at any rate an incomplete 
sanity of moral feeling, and, secondly, a corresponding im- 
pairment or incomplete development of w T ill. That is what 

1 For details of the kind I refer to my treatise on the Pathology of Mind. 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 285 

might perhaps have been foretold; for if a temperament is 
unsound it is predisposed to degeneracy, and the degeneracy, 
whether it be into madness or into badness, will be marked 
by some defect of moral feeling and will. Not that the pecu- 
liarity in these persons commonly reaches a depth or takes 
a character of moral decline which could rightly be termed 
moral degradation; in many instances it is rather of the 
nature of a moral eccentricity or a moral discord, while in 
others it consists in the exaggerated growth of some parti- 
cular quality of character which, natural in temperate develop- 
ment, in excess becomes vice. Vanity grown to such a height 
as to lose the restraint of sanity; love of gain developed into 
an extreme avarice and miserliness ; suspicion and distrust 
of others so excessive as to become a veritable monomania ; 
a mobile impressionability so little ballasted by logic of cha- 
racter or training as to present a perfect exemplar of inco- 
herence of thought and insincerity of feeling ; — these and the 
like egoistic tendencies in hypertrophied growth are the 
tokens of the deep fault, so to speak, in the moral disposi- 
tion. The fundamental note of character beneath the exces- 
sive growths is an intense and narrow self-regarding egoism : 
not necessarily a deliberate, conscious selfishness, but an 
acute self-feeling ; a constant and inveterate reference of all 
impressions to self, which is easily touched to the quick, being 
what is called very sensitive, as well it may be when all its 
sensibilities are collected into one sensitive point and that 
point self; a serene and exacting assumption, of a tacit kind, 
that what is important to him is or ought to be of equal mo- 
ment to all the world and a corresponding exacting demand 
on the services of others, without any sense of obligation or 
gratitude ; a sheer incapacity to conceive the insignificance 
of self in the economy of the whole and to view it and its 
relations objectively. The one thing a person of this kind 
cannot do is to objectify himself — to surmount self by a 
humorous criticism of self. It is impossible for him to 
believe, as he gets to the worst, that he and his concerns do 
not or ought not to fill as large a place in other people's 
thoughts as they do in his own, who, he may come to per- 
suade himself at last, are thinking or speaking ill of him, 



286 THE PATHOLOGY Of WILL. 

scheming arid plotting against liim, ridiculing and shunning 
him, and the like. 

These excessive growths of egoism which put the indi- 
vidual out of sound and wholesome relations with his fellows, 
and so far isolate him, exemplify very well the difficulty of 
attaining to and maintaining the right equilibrium between 
a development of individual tendencies and a just regard to 
the influence of the social medium : too much influenced 
from without, there is an end of spontaneity and he becomes 
little more than an automatic piece in the social mechanism ; 
too little influenced from without, individuality is apt to run 
into an excess which verges on madness in extreme cases, 
and in all cases lacks the wholesome discipline and support 
that are got by growth against resistance and are essential 
to its best development. Yanity is a passion which is of 
social origin, springing from a love of the admiration or 
praise of the kind, and so far is a useful force in the social 
organisation, since it spurs the individual to gain what it 
pleases his vanity to have; although intensely egoistic in 
character, it is altruistic in the source of its sanction as 
an incentive of conduct, and altruistic also in the self- 
sacrificing energies which it sometimes inspires, since a 
person may risk what he values most, even life itself, out of 
an exalted vanity; so it has an intermediate and useful 
position between the more purely egoistic and the more 
purely altruistic feelings. Its social significance is well 
shown by two reflections — first, that the vainest mortal does 
not look for the admiration of bis horse, and, secondly, that 
his horse does not look for the admiration and flattery of its 
kind. But vanity, like other egoistic passions, cannot ever 
obtain its completest gratification if it is too self-regarding ; 
for it then defeats its own end of attracting praise and 
admiration, and brings on its possessor dispraise, ridicule 
and contempt. It is a quality which, in order to discharge 
its function well, must not grow beyond a certain mean ; the 
further it exceeds that measure the further it puts the indi- 
vidual as a social element out of the reach of the controlling, 
modifying, directing and inspiring influences of the social 
organisation ; until at last he becomes a positive morbid ele- 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 287 

ment, useless or injurious in it. That we see to be the ten- 
dency and foresee to be the probable outcome of the narrow, 
intense, excessive vanity of the insane temperament. Envy 
again, another passion of social origin, has an innocent side in 
so far as it stirs the individual to exertion in order to emulate 
him whom he envies ; but when it is suffered to grow rank 
and malignant in the mind it corrodes the strength and eats 
out the goodness of character. So also with regard to the 
feeling of suspicion, which is a natural function in a 
complex social state ; for it is certain that without it no 
one would be able to conduct his life successfully in the 
midst of a crowd of self- regarding elements many of them 
justly deserving to be suspected. Held in due balance by 
the sense of surrounding checks and assimilating their 
influence, it is beneficial; suffered to grow to excess, in 
disregard of the restraining, consolidating, and strengthen- 
ing forces of the social medium, it runs into a mania of 
suspicion that cuts the individual off from communion with 
his kind, and becomes truly insanity. It is unfortunate 
that while the virtues of the mean in the general are evident 
enough, the real difficulty is to find and to keep it in the 
particular, seeing that it is always relative ; the virtue of one 
social medium being the vice of another, the faith of to-day 
the fable of to-morrow. 

As it has undoubtedly been the effect, we may say that 
it has been the aim, of the social union of men to facilitate by 
mutual help the satisfaction of their fundamental or primary 
wants — that is to say, the food-want, the sexual want, and 
one may perhaps add the clothing-want ; and the condition 
and effect of such union have necessarily been, as I have 
already pointed out, a certain repression of the personal or 
egoistic element, since the individual must needs conform to 
restraints on his primary passions in order to have the 
benefits of co-operation and even to render it possible. But 
a further and more remote effect of the increasing social 
complexity is to bring the personal element again into active 
development through the manifold secondary inten 
ambitions, passions that are engendered in the complex 
social state— those social egoisms which are the less crude, 



288 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

but not less selfish, social developments of the primary 
passions. Personal gratification no longer seeks or attains 
its aim in the mere satisfaction of physical wants ; it has to 
seek and attain them in a social medium by social means 
and in social advantages; and so it is that pure egoism 
necessarily undergoes social transformations in spite of 
itself. It appears then that egoistic and altruistic are 
terms which mark too abrupt a division when they are set 
over against one another to signify opposite and unrelated 
passions : for egoism cannot operate in the social sphere to 
its own advantage except by putting on the form of altruism. 
Now the constant tendency of the personal element is to 
inspire and urge to undue gratification these secondary 
passions that are developed out of the social union. Hence 
the difficulty, nay the impossibility, of keeping a society pure ; 
hence indeed an inevitable tendency in itself to breed cor- 
ruption. Selfish devotion to pleasure, eager pursuit of 
wealth without the least regard to the oppression and 
misery that the pursuit may entail on others, unworthy 
ambitions of power and place and the use of unworthy 
means to attain them, guile and fraud in business, enerva- 
ting luxury and effeminacy, decadence of public spirit, all 
the elements' of decay that mark the decline of a society 
and go before its destruction, — these are the outcomes of an 
excessive egoism in its social developments. Obviously their 
tendencies are not to social consolidation but to social dis- 
ruption : without the sentiment of human solidarity intellect 
and power are selfish and disintegrant. In the social fusion 
of egoistic energies, however complete, there is always latent 
a disruptive or explosive disposition, as we may plainly 
understand there must be if their natural repulsions have 
been constrained under tremendous pressure to efface them- 
selves in the development of affinities : it is a tendency of 
them to get free, which gains force rapidly when the 
surroundings are not favourable to the maintenance of the 
social solidarity, and which in any case has its way in the 
end. Tor a society cannot any more than an individual 
continue to develope for ever, or for ever continue in one stay. 
In its primary forms of crude and simple passions the 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 28 l J 

necessary repression of egoism was effected only by the 
awful terrors of superstition and by the most rigorous ex- 
ecutive measures on the part of the community to enforce 
conformity to the tribal or national customs and religions : 
what is there available to do a like needful work now for 
the secondary social egoisms when the gods have one after 
another become extinct and when supernatural terrors have 
lost nearly all their force ? It is a vastly momentous ques- 
sion for modern societies, and they will hardly solve it in 
the best way by going on as if it will never need to be 
solved. In any case it will not fail to solve itself, for 
assuredly the feeling of human solidarity, which is the basis 
and essence of religion in its true sense, is in the social 
organism very much what the heart is in the bodily organism : 
when it ceases to beat there corruption and death begin. 
In a complex social state the individual has not, it is true, 
very great power singly to do mischief, be his aim and work 
never so selfish ; if he is to spread his influence, whether 
baneful or beneficial, widely he must work in combination 
with others. Hence it is that associations and societies for 
co-operation in a common work are so many and active in 
modern communities. Selfish and corrupt men find it 
necessary or advantageous to unite together in societies or 
companies in order to make their evil gains at the cost, and 
oftentimes to the ruin, of the ignorant and the unwary whom 
they delude and defraud. Persons of the same trade, 
though competing eagerly against one another, join in the 
observance of a common trade-morality, which is actually an 
immorality, being a sanctioned fraudulent combination 
against the community under the guise of the custom of t lie 
trade. Too often the modern commercial company is a 
signal and sad example of the social union of bad men to 
extend the area and increase the power of their entirely 
selfish activity ; and the pity of the matter is that the ex- 
posure of nefarious schemes that have overwhelmed hun- 
dreds in ruin do not overwhelm their authors in infamy. So 
it is made evident that a complex society breedl in itself the 
morbid elements which feed on it, flourish in it, and in the 
end kill it. For it is another evil of the social system of 



290 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

which such pernicious antisocial elements are bred and in 
which they flourish, that the wrongdoer mostly goes un- 
punished; the appeal of his victim to law for redress is 
frustrated, because the process has been rendered so tedious, 
troublesome, complex and costly, by the exactions of many 
personal interests engaged in it, as to make it a less suffering 
for him to bear wrongs and less repugnant to allow the 
guilty to go free, than to seek an uncertain redress by that 
means ; more especially when the appeal has to be made to 
those who are tainted with a sympathy for such commercial 
enterprises and cannot see the iniquity of them. 

If such a society is to be saved from corrupting decay, 
nothing but a revolution of some kind will save it ; further 
evolution will only be the evolution of further elements of 
dissolution. The ideal which it worships is a debased and 
debasing one, not truly an ideal, but in reality an anti- ideal, 
and it sees it not. The only salvation then lies in a revolu- 
tion the great and tragic events of which, sweeping away 
conventionalisms and fusing barren and obsolete forms in 
its fire, extinguish ruthlessly these social egoisms, and 
bring men back to the stern realities and radical principles 
of human association. And it is only from below that such 
effective uprising, if it comes from within the society, can 
come. There would appear, however, to be one of three 
events which may happen to a society in this stage of germi- 
nating disruption, as Vico pointed out : either the strong 
hand of a dictator or Csesar who, making himself master, 
holds interests in firm check and gives executive force to 
the administration of paralysed law; or subjugation by a 
nation whose strength has not been corrupted by luxury and 
effeminacy, and which, inferior in so-called civilisation, is yet 
stronger and better, in so far as it is able to conquer and to 
govern ; or lastly, when despot and conqueror alike fail, civil 
strife and war arising out of excessive personal interests and 
weakened social bonds — a return in fact to a waste of barbar- 
ism fro m which at some distant day new life may spring. It 
is Bacon who makes the apt comparison of such disorganised 
and expiring commonwealths to 'the streams of Helicon 
which being hid under the earth (until the vicissitude of 



WILL LN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 201 

things passing) break out again, and appear in some other 
remote nation, though not perhaps in the same climate.' 

With societies as with individuals it is not intellect that 
constitutes character and will save their souls alive : more 
acute intellect will only be a keener pursuit of selfish 
aims if there be not beneath it a sound solidarity of social 
fpeling. The mere lust of knowledge is no better in itself 
than the mere lust of power. It is poor progress to be able 
to move over the earth at a speed ten times faster than our 
forefathers, if we lose our forefathers' simple and solid social 
virtues ; no great thing to surpass them in the brilliancy of 
electric lighting, if we get no better moral illumination. Of 
all foolish labours that may obtain a record in the history of 
humanity, when its course on earth is run, should some 
higher being there ever write the tragical story down, the 
most ludicrously abortive will be seen to be the attempt to 
build up a stable nation on a gospel of smartness. Any one 
who chooses may convince himself that the great revolutions 
of the world which have been the visible beginnings of new 
eras of progress did not spring from intellect but from feel- 
ing; not fully formed, Minerva-like, from the scheming head, 
but by slow gestation from the brooding heart, of mankind. 
"When a revolution has been an affair of the understanding 
it has not been difficult to stop it by cutting off the heads of 
the few who conspired, but when a revolution has been bred 
in the hearts of the people it has not been stopped by cutting 
off their heads. Underneath the surface-waves of national 
consciousness which show themselves in the traditions, 
opinions, open feelings, institutions, aims of a people, 
there are in the deepest fountains of its character a great 
many latent energies at work; and it is these thai punning 
their secret and silent courses in infra-conscious depths really 
prepare the future and, when their waves are felt on the 
surface, determine its course. Manifesting their deep pn] 
here and there from time to time in scattered and disorderlj 
volcanic upheavals which the ignorant ruler, uninspired by 
them, despises, so making ultimate revolution necessary, but 
the wise ruler, inspired by them, takes wise account of, so 
making evolution gradual, — they are the premonitory be 



292 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

of a movement that, coming from the brooding heart of 
society, lies deeper than knowledge, and that knowledge will 
one day have to reckon with. 

As indeed with the individual so it is with humanity as 
a whole : it is feeling that inspires and stirs its great pulses, 
the intellect fashioning the moulds into which the feelings 
shall flow. If you ask then what in time to come is to 
break to pieces the rampant egoisms of modern society, 
and to bring men back to the radical principles of human 
solidarity, seek the answer in a calm and purely scientific 
examination of such scattered upheavals of the great 
sub-conscious social forces as take place from time to time 
in communistic, socialistic, nihilistic, anarchic outbreaks; 
blind, reckless, wildly visionary, seemingly insensate, it 
is true, but not therefore meaningless— neither causeless 
nor without final cause ; on the contrary, pregnant with the 
deepest meaning, being effects of what is in weltering ferment 
now beneath the surface and forewarnings of what will be, 
either catastrophically or gradually. 1 There will be a grim 
experience and a troubled future for the nation that has not 
known, before that hour comes, how to guide these forces in 
the right way, and to absorb and embody them in fitting 
forms of social and political organisation. The French Ee- 
volution was momentous enough as an event, but it is per- 
haps more so as an awful example teaching how silently the 
great social forces mature, how they explode at last in vol- 
canic fury, if too much or too long repressed, and how terrible 
and apparently meaningless a desolation they produce. But 
not meaningless actually; for, as mankind is constituted, 
human progress is through human society, and these devas- 
tating storms are the revenge which the evolutional nisus 
takes on transgressed laws and at the same time the sweep- 
ing remedy which it applies to a rotten social organisation. 
It is anything but a sign of vigorous health when no such 

1 Are they to be denounced, deplored, violently suppressed as wildly 
insane, because they appear simply destructive ? You might as well denounce, 
deplore, and violently suppress the destructive break-up of old chemical com- 
binations, because you cannot foretell the new and higher combinations that 
are eventually to follow. 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 293 

infra-conscious energies are active in a nation, for it means 
that the evolutional impulse in it is exhausted and decadence 
in progress. 

To return from this endeavour to point out the disruptive 
consequences of excessive antisocial egoisms to the straight 
path of our inquiry. A society thoroughly pervaded by sel- 
fish aims and pursuits may, like an individual moved by pre- 
dominant egoisms, go on — the former for several generations, 
the latter perhaps for a lifetime — without showing any further 
tokens of degeneracy; whereupon the passing observer 
remarks only how well the wicked flourish. But let him pass 
by in succeeding generations and things shall not, perhaps, 
wear so flourishing an aspect. The antisocial conditions of 
one generation predetermine the social disintegrations of 
following generations, and the antisocial egoistic develop- 
ment of the individual predisposes to, if it does not predeter- 
mine, the mental degeneracy of his progeny ; he, alien from 
his kind by excessive egoisms, determines an alienation of 
mind in them. If I may trust in that matter my observations, 
1 know no one who is more likely to breed insanity in his 
offspring than the intensely narrow, self-sensitive, suspicious, 
distrustful, deceitful and self-deceiving individual who never 
comes into sincere and sound relations with men and things, 
who is incapable by nature and habit of genuinely healthy 
communion either with himself or with his kind. A moral 
development of that sort is more likely, I believe, to pre- 
determine insanity in the next generation than are many 
forms of actual mental derangement in parents; for the 
whole moral nature is essentially infected, and that g. 
deeper down, and is more dangerous, qua heredity, than B 
particular derangement: a mental alienation is the natural 
pathological evolution of it. Once more, then, we perceive 
how deterioration of moral feeling proves itself to bo an initial 
mark of degeneracy, by the distinct mental dej y which 

it produces when it has free course. 

It goes without saying that the best will eannol 
with such unsound moral dispositions as T have described 
under the name of insane temperament. Trne it is that 
they present sometimes that thin, shrill. will 



294 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

which, inspired by passion, is a sort of spasmodic self-will, 
but we do not observe that calm, full, strong", free will which 
comes of large and true appreciation of external relations 
and of just co-ordination of thoughts, feelings, and desires. 
Moreover, we meet sometimes with most remarkable instances 
of singular impotencies and perversions of will among per- 
sons who have this insane temperament. A thought of a 
painful kind or an impulse to do some absurd or wrong act 
arises in the mind and keeps its footing there, despite the 
most earnest desire to get rid of it; thrust into the back- 
ground for a moment by the urgent call of present interests 
or duties, it returns again and again to the front at the first 
chance, getting at last such a hold of the mind that the 
alarmed individual, who feels himself demoniacally possessed 
by it, is brought to a state of extreme horror and distress. 
Ludicrous as the tale of his sufferings seems in the telling of 
it, even to himself, it causes an unrest and anguish of mind 
which are far from being ludicrous ; for the sense of having 
lost hold of himself, of being at the mercy of an internal 
impulse which is not himself, the alarming apprehension that 
he may in an unguarded moment some day yield to an insti- 
gation which it costs him all his strength of watchful will to 
withstand, the awful feeling of a disruption of self and the 
appalling dissolution of self-confidence that accompanies it, 
— these produce an abiding distress and at times an inde- 
scribable despair. Even when the idea or impulse is in 
momentary abeyance, present enjoyment is hindered and 
the pleasure of hope frustrated by the overhanging dread of 
its recurrence. 

Here then we are presented with a very remarkable dis- 
integration of will in one who is certainly not insane in the 
sense of having lost his reason, seeing that he is clearly con- 
scious of the nature of his affliction and able to reason quite 
as justly about it as any one need be, but who is not sane in 
the sense of having a sound and compact union of well- 
balanced nerve-centres as the basis of his mental organisa- 
tion, and the consequent power over himself which would 
come of such a union. This native weakness, the outcome 
of which is a divided will — a dread of willing in obedience to 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 295 

a rebellions impulse of self that which the larger and truer 
self would not will — is with him a matter of inheritance 
mainly, but a similar condition of nervous system is some- 
times brought about by special nerve-enervating causes. 
Whatever be the intimate and hidden molecular conditions, 
it is plain that the bonds of association between the different 
nervous centres that together constitute the mental organisa- 
tion are so weakened as no longer to exert the inhibitive in- 
fluence necessary to keep them in their natural equilibrium 
and make them act together in perfect unison. The result is 
much like that which befalls when a particular muscle or a 
set of muscles in a physiological group or series betakes 
itself, in consequence of disorder of the proper nerve-centres, 
to independent action against a person's will and occasions 
the sort of mutinous movement we call choreic : it is a kind 
of St. Vitus's dance of the idea or impulse. The movement 
is perhaps distressing to him in the highest degree, but he 
cannot hinder it ; the more he tries to do so, and the more 
he thinks about it, the worse it is. There is a functional 
dissolution of the mental organisation, a disruption of the 
solidarity of its associated centres, the consequence of which 
is a decomposition or disintegration of will. For the will 
means, as I have already shown, the conscious expression of 
the co-ordination of mental functions working to an end : 
that co-ordination imperfect, will is imperfect ; impaired, 
will is impaired ; exact and complete, will reaches its high- 
est quality and energy, its highest functional expression, in 
the particular person. Disruption of co-ordination is de- 
composition of will ; decomposition of will is dissolution of 
self; dissolution of self before it is so great as to entail the 
actual loss of normal consciousness — that is to say, when it 
is impending and forefelt rather than actual and present — 
is accompanied by the most alarming shock to self-con- 
fidence. 

So much then concerning the special feature* of that 
unsoundly tempered character which, stopping short 
actual insanity, is yet, as it were, the premonition of it. Its 
peculiarity being a native deficienoe of mental co-ordination 
and a consequent tendency to separate and inco-ordinate 



296 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

action of parts — a neurosis spasmodica, as I have elsewhere 
described it, which translates itself in consciousness as a con- 
vulsive psychosis — as distempered moral feeling and dismem- 
bered will — it is obvious that any enervating cause reducing 
still lower the natural energy of such a mental organisation 
will easily occasion those more serious disorders of function 
which are recognised as positive mental derangement. 
There is no reserve power in the background available to 
counterbalance the exhausting conditions, and the degeneracy 
runs quickly down to complete anarchy. Herein we may 
discern the explanation of three events which claim notice in 
the clinical history of hereditary madness : the first is the 
ease and rapidity with which the malady passes from its 
beginnings into a display of extreme incoherence ; the second 
is the like rapidity with which recovery takes place some- 
times from an extreme and almost hopeless looking incoher- 
ence, an equilibrium easily upset being easily restored ; and 
the third is the rapidity with which, when recovery does not 
take place, the disease runs down into an extreme and hope- 
less dementia — the easily induced functional disorder of the 
first event lapsing quickly into the organic deterioration of 
the last event. The essentially weak or unstable constitu- 
tion either of nerve-element itself or of the organised associa- 
tion of nerve-centres, or of both — the first being perhaps a 
main condition of the production of the second — in persons 
who have a strong hereditary predisposition to madness is 
shown furthermore by the fact that a similar condition of 
things, betraying itself by similar symptoms, is produced 
sometimes by active nerve-exhausting causes in persons who 
have not up to that time shown any noticeable signs of such 
a predisposition. 

The briefest survey of the main features of the leading 
forms of mental derangement is enough to show that a 
loss of power over the thoughts, feelings, and acts is an 
essential fact of the anarchy. Not that the afflicted person 
is himself distressed usually by this failure of will, or even 
so much as aware of it ; on the contrary, so far from being 
unhappy is he that oftentimes he is jubilant in the exulting 
consciousness of a glorious power of intellect and of a freedom 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 297 

of will which he never experienced before. However, if we, 
distrusting this exultant declaration of self-consciousness, 
set ourselves to watch him attentively, we soon perceive 
that it is innocently playing a gross deception on him ; it is 
the true witness to an exuberant activity of a sort, but by 
no means a competent witness to the quality of the activity, 
for it is inevitably suborned to testify directly as it is directly 
inspired. Before he has actually fallen into mania, indeed 
while he is displaying the premaniacal semblance of mental 
brilliancy that is often so signal a feature of the beginning 
of the attack, it is plain that thoughts and feelings surge up 
in his mind in an irregular and tumultuous fashion, and 
impel him to strange and disorderly acts. There is manifest 
an extraordinary mobility of ideas and feelings for a short 
time before the stage of actual incoherence is reached : 
instant, abrupt, and rapid transitions from subject to subject 
without a following up of the natural affinities or sequences 
of any subject ; no restrained excitation of the proper acces- 
sory ideas, supplemental or complemental, to complete the 
grasp of the perception or of the conception, which therefore 
is only partially formed in the mind, but instant and promis- 
cuous excitation and discharge of ideational centres or tracks 
that receive and react with amazing rapidity ; a correspond- 
ing instability of moods shown by quick and abrupt transi- 
tions through the gamut of feeling from expansive amity 
and effusive cordiality to angry suspicion and menace with- 
out any external provocation ; a restless change of movements 
answering in some measure to the rapid changes of ideas 
and moods. Obviously the natural inter-restraints or inhi- 
bitions of the mental nerve-centres have been impaired or 
abolished ; instead of one of them when stirred to function 
being held in due balance by another that would naturally 
offer such a resistance, the effect seems to be a quick and 
easy inter-stimulation, not perhaps unlike that which persons 
exert upon one another in a crowd inflamed by fear, fury, 
or fanaticism. Instantaneous makings and breakings of 
thought-circuits, and the makings, no sooner made than 
unmade, of all sorts of accidental connections, are the order, 
or rather disorder, of events. We may conclude that the 
20 



298 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

symptoms mark two stages of degeneration, though at 
bottom perhaps these are degrees of the same process : first, 
an excitation of nerve-element whereby the sensitivity of the 
centres and the conductivity of the inter-connecting paths 
are extraordinarily increased, so that quick, varied and 
transient associations of flashing ideas, often only half com- 
plete, give a momentary semblance of mental brilliancy ; and, 
(secondly, as the disorder increases, a further impairment of 
the natural stability of the associated centres, so that disturb- 
ance of equilibrium passes readily and quickly from one to 
another without meeting with any resistance, and there ensues 
a general and tumultuous incoherence. Here, if we consider 
it, appears the truth of the old saying that anger is a short 
madness, especially in those persons whose ideational centres 
have naturally quick sensibilities and little inhibitivities, if 
I may coin such an uncouth word; for in that respect it is 
certain that there exist very great constitutional differences, 
in one person any outbreak of anger being an actual inco- 
herence, while another is hardly ever transported out of 
himself b} r rage, although in most persons a furious passion 
is more or less incoherent. 

It is curious and instructive to watch the struggle which 
is taking place sometimes in the mind at the beginning 
of acute mania, before the undermined will is completely 
shattered. We may observe the patient succeed by a mani- 
fest effort in bringing himself under its control for a few 
moments when he is aware that some one is watching him, 
or when he is spoken with or sharply remonstrated with; 
collecting himself on the instant he speaks and acts in a 
calm, measured, and coherent style, as if after grave deli- 
beration, although he is under an evident strain ; but it 
is an over-strain that he cannot keep np, for the enfeebled 
will soon lets go the reins and he relapses into a turmoil 
of incoherent thought, speech, and conduct, becoming, as 
the disease makes progress, incapable of a moment's real 
Belf-control. In saying that the will lets go the reins, I 
employ a metaphorical expression that properly befits the 
abstract psychologist only ; what is concretely meant is 
that the increase of the inco-ordinate and separate action 



WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 200 

of the supreme centres is the deepening disintegration of 
will. 

Take another variety of madness : the person who is 
suffering from that deep morbid gloom of mind which is 
called melancholia — a gross exaggeration of ordinary melan- 
choly, as mania is a gross exaggeration of ordinary anger 
finds perhaps some painful thought, blasphemous, obscene, 
or otherwise afflicting, come into his mind against his 
earnest wish, causing him unspeakable distress, and hold its 
ground there in spite of all the efforts of an agitated and 
enfeebled will to expel it ; so hateful an intruder is it, so 
alien to his feelings, so repugnant to him, so independent of 
his true self, that, unable to account for it naturally, he ends 
perhaps by ascribing it to the direct inspiration of Satan, to 
whom he believes himself abandoned because of the enormity 
of his sins. Or he may be afflicted with a frequently up- 
starting impulse to do harm to himself or to others, conscious 
all the while of the horrible nature of the impulse which he 
resists with frenzied energy, and going through agonies of 
distress during the paroxysms of its activity, and the struggles 
that he makes to prevent his true will being overmastered 
by it. 

The monomaniac broods over some idea of greatness or 
of suspicion, rooted in its congenial feeling of vanity or sus- 
picion and drawing to itself the sympathetic nourishment of 
like-kinded ideas and feelings, until the weakened will loses 
restraining hold of it, and it grows to the height of an insane 
delusion. It is an instance of the disruption of the solidarity 
of the mental nerve-centres : first, by a concentrated or 
predominant function of one group of them, and subsequently 
by an excessive development or hypertrophy of that group, 
so to speak; and with these conditions goes a corresponding 
breach of the integrity of will, functional and remediable in 
the first, organic and for the most part irremediable in the 
second, event. Here again it is curious and interesting to 
watch the alternating predominance of the true and the 
insane self at the outset of the degeneracy, according as the 
individual is or is not under the sway of his delusion, and 
the sort of struggle for existence that is going on between 



300 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

them ; in the good event of recovery the sane self gradually 
gains the day and he emerges into clear consciousness ; in 
the bad event of deterioration, the insane self carries the 
day, and he imagines himself, if of optimistic temperament, 
prophet, king or other great personage, or believes, if pessi- 
mistic, that the whole world is in a conspiracy against him. 
Whatever the event, it is an example of the survival of the 
fittest : the fixed delusion is the fit pathological develop- 
ment of the naturally weak and vain temperament which 
withdraws from the discipline of facts into an unwholesome 
indulgence of egoisms ; the return to sanity is the proper 
self-assertion of a stronger and sounder natural temperament 
which is capable of coming into wholesome relations with 
its surroundings. Were I called upon to compress into one 
shorb precept the essence of the best rules to be observed in 
order to prevent the development of such an insanity, I 
should be tempted to say to the individual, Learn to think 
yourself no less a fool than anybody whom you think a fool. 
Everywhere then we observe impaired will to mark the 
beginnings of mental derangement, and effaced will to mark 
its last and worst stages. For when we contemplate the sad 
spectacle of its last term, as we are confronted with ifc in the 
utterly demented person in whom all traces of mind are well- 
nigh extinguished, who must be fed, washed, dressed by 
others, cared for in every way, being incapable of any care 
of himself, whose life is little more than a mere vegetative 
existence, we see plainly a complete abolition of rational 
will go along with the complete mental disorganisation. Is 
there behind this degraded matter, and struggling in vain to 
utter itself, a soul of the same substance and quality as that 
of the philosopher ? 



SECTION VI. 

THE DISINTEGRATIONS OP THE ' EGO.' 

A diligent study of the facts of mental pathology would do 
the pure psychologist a real service, if it moved him to obtain 
and frame for himself some kind of notion of the material 
conditions of things which he concedes to run parallel with 
the divers will-energies, albeit he might continue to uphold 
the self-sufficingness of his introspective method. Why not 
resolve to have a definite mental representation of the two 
invariably and essentially parallel processes, when he has 
occasion to think of either ? It would be an excellent check 
on vagueness of thought and expression, for it would help 
him to feel that he has a definite meaning in the abstract and 
somewhat empty psychological terms which he uses so freely, 
and to make others feel it, and would perhaps render his 
use of them a little more deliberate, exact, and sparing. 
Nor would it be amiss by way of gaining a conception of 
the nature of the mental organisation, and of the expression 
of its co-ordinate functions in will, to reflect at the same 
time on the solidarity that exists between the various parts 
of a complex State, ideally well ordered and well governed, 
whereby the executive action is the full and faithful repre- 
sentation of all interests in their due subordinations and 
co-ordinations; or, if he likes better to go down to the 
physiological organism than upwards to the social organism 
for a helpful illustration, let him consider the wonderful 
sympathy and synergy of organs there, and ask himself if 
they would do their work so well had they the disturbing 
gift of consciousness. This in any case he should not fail 
to apprehend : that in that exquisitely fine and intricately 
complex organisation which is the physical basis of mind 
every interest of the entire body, every organic energy, has 
direct or indirect representation: there is nothing in the 
outermost that is not, so to speak, represented in the inner- 
most. Not one organ but all organs, not one structure but 
all structures, not one movement but all movements, not one 



302 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

feeling but all feelings ; all vibrations of energy, of what sort 
soever, from all parts of the body, the nearest and the most 
remote, the meanest and most noble, conscious and infra- 
conscious ; — stream into the unifying centre and make their 
felt or unfelt contributions to the outcome of conscious 
function. The brain is the central organ of the bodily 
synthesis, sympathy, and synergy, and the will at its best 
the supreme expression of that unity. Therefore it is that 
in will is contained character : not character of mind only, 
as commonly understood, but the character of every organ 
of the body, the consentient functions of which enter into 
the full expression of individuality. 

That being so, it is made evident that disorganisation of 
the union of the supreme cerebral centres must be a more or 
less dissolution of the conscious self, the ego, according to 
the depth of the damage to the physiological unity. Even 
if any one organ of the body be defective, it is a breach in 
the supreme unity of consciousness, for it is a deprivation to 
the extent of its deficient energy, and a disturbance to the 
degree that its work is thrown upon other organs : it is like 
a horse in a team that does not do its exact share of the 
work uniformly. The constant feeling of personal identity 
on which metaphysicians lay so much stress as a fundamental 
intuition of consciousness, discerning in it the incontestable 
touch and proof of a spiritual ego which they cannot get 
into actual contact with in any other way, may be expected 
to be sometimes wavering and uncertain, in other cases 
divided and discordant, and in extreme cases extinguished. 
But that is a dismayful expectation to entertain concerning 
the ' I,' the ' ego ' — the ens unum et semper cognitum in omni- 
bus notitiis — of which they thus protest we have more or less 
clear consciousness in every exercise of intelligence. Look 
frankly then at the facts and see what conclusion they 
warrant. Is there the least sign of a consciousness of his 
ego in the senseless, speechless, howling, slavering, dirty, 
defenceless, and utterly helpless idiot, whose defective 
cerebral centres are incapable of responding to such weak 
and imperfect impressions as his dull senses are able to 
convey, and incapable of any association of the few, dim and 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.* 303 

vague impressions that he does receive? No doubt his body, 
so long as it holds together by the ministering care of others, 
may be said to be an ego or self; but from the human stand- 
point what a self! It is not a mental ego, since the central 
organic mechanism in which the lower bodily energies should 
obtain higher representation, and mental organisation take 
place — the before- mentioned synthesis, sympathy, and synergy 
be effected — is either altogether wanting or hopelessly ill 
constructed. The miserable specimen of degeneracy does 
not and cannot therefore in the least know that he is a self, 
or feel that a human self is degraded in him. If the sure 
and certain proof of a soul existing independent of the organ- 
ism, and the thereupon based sure and certain hope of a 
resurrection to life eternal, be the distinct and permanent 
consciousness of identity amongst all changes and chances 
of mortal structure, it is certainly a mighty pity that 
the proof should fail us in the very case in which its certi- 
tude is most needed, would be most consoling and assuring, 
and its success most triumphant. 

While the idiot yields us a signal example of the depri- 
vation of a consciousness of self the records of mental 
pathology yield abundant examples of its derangements or 
depravations. What shall be said of the mean person born 
in a garret and bred in a kitchen who has never gone 
beyond the dreary routine of the basest manual labour, and 
who nevertheless believes and declares himself to be king 
of England or the Saviour of the world? It will be said 
perhaps that after all he has not lost consciousness of self, 
seeing that he is conscious he is a self, albeit he hafl a Wrong 
notion of the self which he is. Certainly he is likely, so long 
as his body keeps its unity of being, to be conscious of being 
that unity ; but it is plainly nonsense to say that he has a 
distinct, ever-present, intuitive consciousness of personal 
identity when he cannot identify himself. The curious 
thing is that this great personage, after lie hafl found his 
way into a lunatic asylum, sometimes settles down thne into 
a quiet and monotonous routine, doing the humble work set 
him to do as if he were quite a common person, and accept- 
ing the attentions of his lowborn relatives when they ^visit 



304 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

him ; not failing, however, to assert his pretensions when- 
ever reference is made to them, and becoming angry and 
excited when they are called in question, ridiculed, or denied. 
In practice, so long as he thinks not of himself, he is his 
true self ; in thought, so soon as he thinks of himself, he is 
his untrue self. He presents a double or divided personality : 
his true one representing the habits of his automatic being 
and the more stable functions of his lower nervous centres, 
which he exhibits in his capacity of routine-worker doing 
mechanically what he is set to do ; his other and not true 
self, which he exhibits when he reflects on himself and 
asserts his pretensions, representing the less fixed and now 
deranged functions of his supreme nerve-centres, especially 
of that group of them which is the basis of his deluded 
thought. Thus he has lost what was his last human gain — 
his consciousness of true moral identity; he has retained 
consciousness of his personality as an eating, drinking, and 
labour-performing organic machine. No wonder that his 
conduct exhibits a gross inconsistency, and stirs a sort of 
doubt or suspicion whether he really believes himself to be 
the great person he claims to be, when his mental nature is 
thus divided into two dissentient parts that act indepen- 
dently, and cannot be brought into consentient function. 
As when an organism has become the seat of a serious 
morbid growth which increases at its expense and to its 
detriment, yet lives its own life apart from it, it can no 
longer be said to have a true physiological unity, but actually 
embodies in itself two different and hostile unities ; so with 
the mind in which a morbid delusion has grown to such a 
height as to impose itself upon the judgment, and, taking 
no part in normal thought, lives its own life apart, there is 
no longer unity but division of the personality or self — a 
pathological unity developed within the natural physiological 
one. The metaphysical assertion that the ego has not exten- 
sion and is not divisible is then confronted with two weighty 
objections : first, that it is impossible for extended beings to 
form a mental representation or even so much as a definite 
conception of an entity of that nature, and, secondly, that 
it is directly opposed to plain facts of observation. 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 305 

The truth is that the manifold varieties of mental 
derangement yield examples of all degrees of lessening 
brightness of the consciousness of self down to its actual 
extinction, and of all sorts of derangement and confusion of 
it from the least unto the worst distraction. Always the 
difficulty in a particular case is to know exactly what the 
defect or confusion is, since it is not possible to enter into 
another person's mind, to realise his state of consciousness, 
and in that way to measure and appreciate its exact degree 
and quality. The tendency is inevitable to misinterpret 
facts, because it is to interpret them by the light and 
according to the standard of a sound consciousness; and 
that is a mode of interpretation which may be quite as 
wrong as it would be to judge the defective sense of the 
colour-blind person by the colour-sense of one who is sensi- 
ble to all the varieties and intensities of colour. The latter 
finds it hard to realise in the first instance, and if he be an 
ignorant person can hardly be made to realise, that any one 
has that defect, because it is so contrary to his own experi- 
ence, and his preoccupied mind is not open to receive the 
plain evidence of facts. So it is with the sundry and divers 
defects and abnormalities of consciousness met with in the 
different varieties of mental derangement; the railing judge 
denounces the insane criminal whom he sentences to death, 
just as if they both had the same sane consciousness, and 
he, abandoned wretch, had wickedly violated it for the selfish 
pleasure of doing murder ; and the introspective psychologist 
bases his entire philosophy upon a method which assumes 
the self-sufficingness of his individual consciousness. Mean- 
while it requires a long and patient observation of instances, 
for which there is for the most part neither the opportunity, 
nor the inclination, nor the training, to correct these errors 
of assumption and to infix in the mind just conceptions of 
the variety of obscurations, eclipses, and distractions to which 
consciousness is liable. 

How many patient observations and experiments, and 
how much steadfast insistence, on the part of the physiologist 
were required to prove to the introspective psychologist, 
measuring all human actions by a standard of consciousness, 



306 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

that there was a class of movements which, having a purpo- 
sive form and constituting a large part of daily conduct, 
were nevertheless strictly automatic, being performed with- 
out will and in some instances without consciousness. Even 
now his recognition of them is not much better than a lip- 
acknowledgment, and he rather annexes them as a foreign 
appendage to his philosophy, than assimilates and incorpo- 
rates them into its substance. Consider it well, and it will 
be seen that in the formation, nature, and purpose-effecting 
work of a complex reflex act there are all the elements of 
that which when consciousness goes with it — as it does in the 
functions of the highest nerve-centres — we call knowledge : 
reception and reaction, registration of experience, associa- 
tion of registered experiences, adaptation of means to end, 
and definite action in accordance with these anterior opera- 
tions — in fact, incorporate knowledge, reason made substance. 
For what are these purely bodily operations at bottom but 
processes which, w T hen they take place consciously, we 
describe as feeling, retention or memory, apprehension, 
judgment, belief and will ? An agile person who is accus- 
tomed to cross a busy street quickly, darting in and out 
among the vehicles with which it is crowded, performs a 
dozen acts of judgment in as many seconds on each occasion, 
without being conscious of them. Let him deliberate about 
the several decisions which he makes and he will most likely 
be knocked down and run over. For the relations of his 
quick and apt movements are not to the conscious ego, of 
which they are well-nigh independent in direct aim as in 
function, but essentially to the preservation and maintenance 
of the organic ego. The mind has little, if any, more to do 
immediately with them than it has to do with the short 
flight that a hen makes after its head has been chopped 
off. It will probably be a long time yet before the full 
meaning of this physiological fact is realised, and the con- 
ception applied to the bodily operations of the same kind 
which, because they are illumined by consciousness, are 
deemed to mark a new order of being and called mental, 
and before, therefore, clear and exact notions are obtained of 
what the body can do by itself and of the part which con- 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 307 

sciousness truly has in mental function. Probably it will 
be a still harder matter to convince the psychologist of the 
derangements and distractions which the consciousness ol 
self actually undergoes in disease, since they are entirely 
opposed to his mental preoccupations, and the domain of 
them lies altogether away from his observation. Contra- 
dictory instances that discredit the very basal principle of 
his method, it is more easy and natural to pass them by 
without consideration as morbid and irrelevant, than to make 
an unwelcome study of them. 

It is a common event in one sort of mental disorder, 
especially at the beginning of it, for the person to complain 
that he is completely and painfully changed ; that he is no 
longer himself, but feels himself unutterably strange ; and 
that things around him, though wearing their usual aspect, 
yet somehow seem quite different. I am so changed that I 
feel as if I were not myself but another person ; although I 
know it is an illusion, it is an illusion which I cannot shake 
off; all things appear strange to me and I cannot properly 
apprehend them even though they are really familiar ; they 
look a long way off and more like the figures of a dream than 
realities, and indeed it is just as if I were in a dream and my 
will paralysed. It is impossible to describe the feeling of 
unreality that 1 have about everything; I assure myself 
over and over again that I am myself, but still I cannot 
make impressions take their proper hold of me, and come 
into fit relations of familiarity with my true self ; between 
my present self and my past self it seems as if an eternity of 
time and an infinity of space were interposed ; the suffering 
that I endure is indescribable : — such is the kind of language 
by which these persons endeavour to express the profound 
change in themselves which they feel only too painfully but 
cannot describe adequately. An observer of little experience, 
or one who has made little good use of his experience, 
judging these complaints by a self-inspective standard, is 
sure to think that the distress and impotence are largely 
fanciful or at any rate much overstated, and that they might 
be got rid of if the will could be stirred to proper effoi 
not able to realise in his own experience such an extraor- 



308 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL, 

dinary mental state, he cannot enter into real sympathy with 
it or believe thoroughly in it. But if he has never had the 
delirium of a fever to give him practical experience of strange 
conscious states and to confound and alarm him with the 
most singular distractions of self, let him call to mind what 
has doubtless happened to himself more than once when he 
has been awakened suddenly out of sleep and been helplessly 
unable for a few moments to realise who he was or where he 
was or whether he was at all, although seeing around him 
the usual objects, cognising but not recognising them, 
hearing words distinctly but apprehending them not; let 
him then imagine this brief and passing phase of conscious- 
ness to persist, and to be his ordinary mental state ; and he 
will in that way obtain far juster notions of the extraordinary 
states of abnormal consciousness than he will ever get by 
the sharpest and most skilful inspection of its ordinary states. 
The interpretation one may guess to be something of this 
kind. When the sleeper wakes in a sudden start out of a 
deep sleep or in the midst of a dream, the impressions made 
upon the senses from without, though he is dimly conscious 
of them, do not strike an accordant chime of the correspond- 
ing idea-centres, and therefore no perception takes place, 
the mind is a blank — the senses in fact are awake before 
their perceptive centres. As these, however, awaken in 
instant succession from their torpor, he becomes more clearly 
conscious, the mind less blank but more confused, because 
external impressions begin now to strike some partial and 
wavering accordances with the partially awakened ideas and 
their associations ; the result being a sort of half-conscious- 
ness of self, or rather a dim consciousness of a distracted or 
half-self. At last the whole mental organisation recovers its 
full functions, the internally organised percepts accord com- 
pletely with their fitting external impressions and are in free 
relations with one another, and he is himself again recognis- 
ing distinctly everything about him. So it is with the 
deranged and partially deranged mind. In consequence per- 
haps of some intimate disorder of the nerve-elements of the 
brain, but at any rate in consequence of the interruption of 
the bonds of association between the functionally grouped 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 309 

centres whereby they combine in each percept and, at a 
higher level of abstraction, in each concept, the indivi- 
dual is cut off from his natural hold of external realities, 
cannot make circuit with them, so to speak, and they there- 
fore seem to be removed to a greater distance or wear a 
strange aspect of unfamiliarity ; the dull and dim sensations 
that he has from them cannot be brought into full, close, and 
exact relations with the past organised constituents of the 
ego. These his perceptions and conceptions of the external 
world as he has learned by experience to perceive and con- 
ceive it do not, because of the disorder of their mental 
organisation, supply the fitting interpretation of the signs or 
language of sense through which objects appeal to it ; His 
just as if he were being addressed in foreign language only 
partially understood by him ; and accordingly the impressions 
made upon the senses by his surroundings, not being tho- 
roughly recognised and adequately interpreted by the excita- 
tion of their accordant percepts, are not felt and known 
as familiar, not truly realised, seem not in fact to be his. 

Is it not as if the cerebral molecules had undergone a sort 
of half -turn or dislocation — some polar displacement perhaps 
— and were fixed there, and so could come only into partial 
relations with one another ? Manifestly were that to take 
place between the molecules it would entail a corresponding 
dissociation of the functionally grouped centres, an event 
which for that or some other reason has certainly taken 
place. The supposition, fanciful as it is, of a temporary 
polar dislocation of the molecules, accords at any rate with 
the singularly sudden and complete way in which the whole 
trouble vanishes sometimes, the person who is at one mo- 
ment sunk in the deepest apathy and gloom bounding almost 
instantly into an opposite state of brisk and joyous energy* 
' With one bound the depression vanished, ' wrote a lady who 
had been for two or three months in a profound apathy of 
mental prostration. 'It always goes in that way. Last night 
I could have maintained that some abscess broke in my brain. 
It was like the bursting of a dyke : no pain, but something 
seemed to give way.' In this relation there are two simple 
observations that seem fitted to teach something concerning 



310 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

the mystery of personal identity : the first is, that a foreign 
body — an artificial tooth, for example — which is in constant 
sensory contact with a part of the body becomes in feeling a 
part of it; and the second is, that a paralysed or much 
numbed part of the body becomes in feeling apart from it, 
in fact, a foreign body. Thus then an artificial tooth, after 
it has become a habit of the body, is positively a truer part 
of the conscious ego than a paralysed finger. If you do not 
get the impressions from without, the world of experience in 
its modes as you have perceived and thought it habitually, 
into fitting contact with your organised perceptions and con- 
ceptions within, so that they are in unison, it is a strange 
world to you or you are strange to it — that is to say, 
an estranged or alienated self. Severed from the surround- 
ings, physical and social, to which, in which, and through 
which the individual has grown and lived, he is virtually not 
himself. There could be no intuition of the ego without a 
complementary or correlative non-ego, no social individual 
being without a social medium. 

An interesting and very striking example of changed 
personal identity is furnished by a form of mental derange- 
ment which, as it revolves regularly through two alternating 
and opposite phases, was called by French writers circular 
insanity, but is better called alternating insanity. An attack 
of much mental excitement with great elation of thought, 
feeling, and conduct is followed by an opposite dark phase 
of depression, gloom, and apathy, each state lasting for 
weeks or months, and the usual succession of them recurring 
from time to time after longer or shorter intervals of sanity. 
Between the two states the contrast is as striking as could 
well be imagined : in the one the person is elated, exultant, 
self-confident, boastful and overflowing with energy ; talks 
freely of private matters which he would never have men- 
tioned in his sound state, and familiarly with those above 
and below him in station whom, when himself, he would not 
have thought of addressing; in like manner writes many 
and long letters full of details of opinions, affairs, and plans, 
to persons with whom he has a slight acquaintance only ; 
spends money recklessly, though not reckless in that way by 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 311 

natural disposition ; projects bold and sometimes wild 
schemes of adventure; is ready and pleased to harangue in 
public who never made a public speech before ; is careless of 
social proprieties and even disregards moral reticences and 
restraints; listens to prudential advice but heeds it not, 
being inspired with an extraordinary feeling of well-being, of 
intellectual power, of unfettered thought and will. An 
actual disruption of the ego there is not, but there is an 
extraordinary exaltation of it, in fact an extreme moral 
rather than an intellectual alienation. The condition of 
things is much like that which goes before an ordinary out- 
break of acute mania, when there is great mental exaltation 
without actual incoherence, alienation of character without 
alienation of intelligence, but it is not, like it, followed by 
turbulent degeneracy ; for when the excitement passes off 
there supervenes the second phase, that of extreme mental 
despondency and moral prostration. 

How changed the person now from what he was ! As 
self-distrustful as before he was self- sufficient ; as retiring 
as before he was obtrusive ; as shy and silent as before he 
was loud and talkative ; as diffident as before he was 
boastful; as impotent to think and act as before he was 
eager and energetic to plan and to do ; as entirely oppressed 
with a dominating sense of mental and bodily incapacity as 
before he was possessed with an exultant feeling of exalted 
powers. To all intents and purposes he is a different person, 
another ego, at any rate so far as consciousness is con- 
cerned—subjectively though not objectively — since in all 
relations he feels, thinks, and acts quite differently. Not 
less marked than the mental transformation is the accom- 
panying veritable bodily transfiguration in some cases ; for 
during the exaltation there is a general animation of the 
bodily functions which makes the individual look, as he 
feels, years younger. The skin is more fresh and soft, its 
wrinkles are smoothened, the eyes bright, eager, and 
animated, the hair less grey than it perhaps was, the pulse 
more vigorous, the digestion stronger, the activity Lncrea 
tenfold, and one who had ceased to be after the manner of 
women may become so again. During the sequent prostra- 



312 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

tion the contrast is so great that he would hardly be known 
to be the same person by one who knew him only slightly ; 
for every one of the foregoing signs of youth and vigour has 
given place to as marked a sign of age and want of vigour. 
In the one state he is as if he had drunk a draught of the 
elixir of life, in the other as if he had foretasted the apathy 
of death. 

An interesting fact which cannot fail to attract attention 
is that during the exalted state of this alternating derange- 
ment the person does with almost exact automatic repetition 
the things that he did, and has the thoughts and feelings 
that he had, in former exalted states, and during the pros- 
trate state that he thinks, feels and does exactly as he did 
in former prostrate states. In the one state, however, he 
has not a clear and exact remembrance of the events of the 
other ; not probably that he forgets them entirely, but that 
he has only that sort of vague, hazy and incomplete remem- 
brance which one has oftentimes of the events of a dream, 
or that a drunken man has, when sober, of his drunken 
feelings and doings. How indeed could he remember them 
clearly, since it is plain he would be compelled, in order to 
do so, to reproduce exactly in himself the one state when he 
was actually in the other? It is impossible therefore he 
should realise sincerely the experiences of the one during 
the other, though he may know as a matter of fact that they 
occurred to him, and, feeling some shame for what he 
remembers, and misgivings concerning what he does not 
remember, be unwilling to recall them and speak of them. 

Nearly related to these cases, and probably belonging to 
the same category, are the examples of so-called double 
consciousness that have lately attracted psychological atten- 
tion ; notably a case described by Dr. Azam, of which great 
notice has been taken, though there was no special novelty in 
it. The mental disorder of a hysterical woman revolved 
through two quite different abnormal phases alternately : 
from her normal state when she was serious, sober, reserved, 
industrious, she passed, after an interval of sleep and loss of 
consciousness, into an abnormal state, when she was gay, 
talkative, imaginative, turbulent and coquettish, remember- 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 313 

ing then her former similar states and also her normal life. 
In due course this lively condition was followed by an 
extreme torpor of mind and body, from which she returned 
gradually to her natural self ; and in this her normal state 
she is said to have entirely forgotten everything that passed 
during the abnormal states, albeit remembering the events 
of her proper life — that is to say, remembering her experi- 
ences when she was her true self ; not remembering her 
thoughts, feelings, and doings when she was not herself, 
but another self. As she advanced in years, the normal 
states became shorter and rarer, the abnormal longer, and 
the transitions from the one to the other almost instanta- 
neous. These are the usual features of the recurrent mental 
exaltations and torpid depressions that characterise alternat- 
ing insanity ; and it is the common order of events in such 
cases for the lucid intervals to become shorter, rarer and 
less complete, until the disease takes a continuous course 
with periodically changing phases. One may doubt perhaps 
whether all the events of her abnormal states were as clean 
swept from the memory as the reporter of the case assumes, 
since those who suffer as she did, having a dull, painful, and 
at the same time confused consciousness of having done and 
said foolish things during their states of excited alienation, 
will say they forget them rather than attempt to bring back to 
their minds what they would gladly forget and willingly be 
thought to have forgotten. The natural self, ashamed of the 
abnormal self, is unwilling as it is certainly in great measure 
unable to identify itself with it, confessing however by this 
very sense of shame a vague consciousness of identity. 

It admits of no doubt that there are states of deranged con- 
sciousness in which things are done that are not remem- 
bered in the least when the person comes to his true self, 
just as there are dreams that are not remembered : in the 
so-called hypnotic or mesmeric state, for example, and in 
some remarkable varieties of epilepsy, with which the pheno- 
mena of somnambulism in some respects and the paroxjsma 
of recurrent mania in other respects exhibit suggestive 
affinities. There is an epilepsy of consciousness, so to speak, 

which has no more true relation to the normal consciousness 
21 



314 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

of the individual than the epileptic convulsions to his natural 
movements, or than the convulsive frenzy of people in a 
panic when a crowded theatre takes fire to their normal 
mental states. Ask one who has gone through such an 
excited experience to describe to you what he saw, felt, and 
thought during it, and you will learn how little a person 
may remember immediately afterwards of that which he was 
acutely conscious of at the time. After a genuine epileptic 
seizure certainly, sometimes perhaps before ifc, sometimes 
in its stead, the individual will go through a series of 
acts in a more or less methodical way, as if he were con- 
scious of what he was doing ; and there is no one who, 
observing him, would not say he was ; and yet, when he 
comes to his true self, he shall have no more remembrance 
of what he did than the somnambulist has of his doings in 
the night. It is a hard matter then for those who see him 
act with so much purpose and coherence, and consider the 
method shown in his behaviour, to be persuaded that he 
knew not what he did ; but assuredly if he is conscious at 
the time, he forgets immediately afterwards (how help it if 
he cannot produce at will the exact recurrence of his 
abnormal state ?) ; and though his acts may have evinced 
something of the form of his habits, they were not the out- 
come of his true self, not what he would have done had he 
been in possession of his normal consciousness. To make the 
normal self responsible for them would be just as if one 
were to make a person responsible for the imagined deeds of 
his dreams; in which case everybody would have to be 
hanged. Indeed it is dream-life that is best fitted to give 
us a just conception of the nature of these abnormal states of 
consciousness, since we cannot enter into them from the 
data of a sound consciousness, and of the partial, confused, 
uncertain memories, or of the complete oblivion, of them 
after they are gone. 

In spite, then, of aught which psychological theory 
appealing to its own internal oracle may urge to the con- 
trary, it is incontestably proved by observation of instances 
that there are states of disordered consciousness which, 
being quite unlike states of normal consciousness, are not to 



DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 315 

be measured by them, and the events of which may be 
remembered only dimly, hazily felt rather than remembered, 
or completely forgotten. The lesson of them is the lesson 
which has been enforced over and over again on physiolo- 
gical grounds — namely, that the consciousness of self, the 
unity of the ego, is a consequence, not a cause ; the expres- 
sion of a full and harmonious function of the aggregate of 
differentiated mind-centres, not a mysterious metaphysical 
entity lying behind function and inspiring and guiding it ; 
a subjective synthesis or unity based upon the objective 
synthesis or unity of the organism. As such, it may be 
obscured, deranged, divided, apparently transformed. For 
every breach of the unity of the united centres is a breach 
of it : subtract any one centre from the intimate physio- 
logical co-operation, the self is pro tanto weakened or 
mutilated ; obstruct or derange the conducting function of 
the associating bonds between the various centres, so that 
they are dissociated or disunited, the self loses in corre- 
sponding degree its sense of continuity and unity ; stimulate 
one or two centres or groups of centres to a morbid hyper- 
trophy so that they absorb to them most of the mental 
nourishment and keep up a predominant and almost exclusive 
function, the personality appears to be transformed ; strip 
off a whole layer of the highest centres — that highest super- 
ordinate organisation of them that ministers to abstract 
reasoning and moral feeling — you reduce man to the condi- 
tion of one of the higher animals ; take away all the supreme 
centres, }'OU bring him to the state of a simply sentient 
creature ; remove the centres of sense, you reduce him to a 
bare vegetative existence when, like a cabbage, he has an 
objective but no subjective ego. These are the conclusions 
which we are compelled to form when, not blinking facts, 
we observe nature sincerely and interpret it faithfully, 
going to plain experience for facts to inform our under- 
standings, instead of invoking our own imaginations to utter 
oracles to us. 

I have said enough to show that moral feeling, will, and 
consciousness of self are no less liable to suffer from the 
accidents of bodily structure than the mental functions of a 



316 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

lower grade ; that the highest have no immunity or privilege 
over the lowest in that respect ; that when disease invades 
the physical substrata of mental organisation they are the 
first to attest its deranging effects. Nothing would be 
gained by going into fuller pathological details, for the 
difficulty is not to multiply instances, as might easily be 
done, but to get plain instances attended to and the lessons 
of them taken to heart. 1 The teachings of mental pathology 
are at one with the teachings of mental physiology, and 
indeed with some of the teachings of a rightly interpreted 
introspection, in pointing to the same plain conclusion — 
namely, that mind does not mean a new order of things in 
the sense of a new, entirely special and unrelated order of 
being, not subject to the laws which reign in nature, but 
inspired from God in the first instance and not anywise to 
be known afterwards except through the same inspiration ; 
that in the study of sound mental function we have to do 
with a natural evolution from the basis of all that has gone 
before in the order of existence, with that indeed which is 
the latest and highest outcome of the long travail of matter, 
and in the study of mental pathology with a dissolution or 
unbecoming; and that the fruitful method to be pursued 
is the positive method of observation and induction, which 
has been successfully employed in the other sciences. That 
is the true way, and their gains are the solid steps, by which 
we can ascend and enter into the chamber of mind. 

1 I may refer here to a small volume entitled Zes Maladies de la Volonte, 
by Monsieur Th. Ribot, the well-known editor of the Revue Philosophiaue. I 
regret that the book reached me after this work was in type. 



SECTION VII. 

WHAT WILL BE THE END THEEEOF ? 

Are we to look forward to a continued becoming or to an 
ultimate unbecoming of things ? Will evolution on earth go 
on for ever ? Or is not the end of life on earth foredoomed 
by as certain a fate as the end of individual life ? Will not 
the same causes that have formed it, and are bringing it to 
perfection, even should they continue to operate, inevitably 
bring it to destruction ? To us, who are alive, it may seem 
incredible that death can be the adequate end of such a long 
succession and such a vast complexity of life ; but it is 
incredible only because we are alive and conceive things 
according to our own measure ; it will be more credible to 
each of us when he is nearly dead, and not incredible at all 
when he is dead. Without doubt there will be further great 
gains of evolution yet in the long long while the world may 
last, but all the signs point plainly to the conclusion that 
its range on earth is limited, its end forefixed in its past, 
foretokened in the present, foredoomed in the future. It 
may be the time will come after many ages, as good men 
hoping believe, when mankind, dwelling together in peace 
and unity, shall not learn war any more, and righteousness 
shall reign upon earth, or when, as philosophic idealists 
dream, a higher race of beings sprung by evolutional ascent 
from man and realising his loftiest ideals shall supplant 
him; but even if these visions of devout imagination become 
facts they will only be the steps of a progress that lead 
progress so much nearer to its grave. Nay, it may weD be 
that man is destined to perish off the face of the earth 
before he has attained to the wisdom and goodness that he 
aspires to; that he is doomed, Moses-like, only to see from 
a distance, but never to enter, the promised land of his hopes. 
The universe makes no sign of feeling itself under the least 
obligation to make him realise his ideal, and the predomi- 
nance of the ideal itself in the world must be denied 
precarious so long as an evil power or anti-idealistic pi 



318 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

exists in it, since the latter may always hope to win in the 
end. Alongside a process of evolution there has always been 
in operation a process of degeneracy, and the simple ques- 
tion is whether this process will not eventually gain the 
upper hand, and then increasing in a geometrical ratio undo 
rapidly all that has been done slowly through the ages. 

For what is the actual basis, the fundamental condition, 
of all the progress from simple to complex combinations of 
matter, from dead to living matter, from low to high 
organisms, from simple sensation and movement to moral 
feeling and will? If the answer be made that it is God that 
giveth the increase, the answer must be received in silence, 
provided only that is not the particular God of any particu- 
lar people that is meant : not the God of India, nor of Egypt, 
nor of Greece, nor of Rome, nor of Abraham, nor of Mahomet, 
nor even the God, older than these Gods, that was worshipped 
by the ancestors of the whole Aryan race under the names 
of Light and Sky — Dydus-pitar or Heaven-Father, who 
became afterwards the Zevs jrarrjp, or Jupiter. Without 
vainly attempting the impossible feat of going beyond our 
relations back to a First Cause which must necessarily be 
incomprehensible, and even so much as to name is to defame, 
we see plainly that the essential condition of all the succes- 
sive becomings of things on earth (the <j)v<rt,9 of the Greek 
philosophers which, meaning literally a becoming, we trans- 
late and personify as Nature, and bid fair soon to personify 
as Evolution) is the light and heat of the sun. This is the 
force — represented of old as Father-Heaven generating upon 
Mother-Earth — which, acting upon matter through countless 
ages, has inspired it to go through its evolutional changes : 
the sun, ' of this great world both eye and soul,' praised by 
herbs and trees and flowers in the joy of their vernal beauty, 
by birds in their thrilling melodies of song, by poets in their 
rhapsodies of love. Praise him, ye hosts of planets, poised 
in your orbits by him ; praise him, ye mists and exhalations ; 
praise him, ye winds, and wave your tops, ye pines; join 
voices, all ye living souls ; ye birds, bear in your wings and 
in your notes his praise ; ye that in waters glide, and ye that 
walk the earth, praise him. 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF ? 319 

Hail, universal Lord, be bounteous still 
To give us only good ; and if the night 
Have gathered aught of evil, or concealed, 
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark ! ' 

Such the language of adoration and praise which Milton 
represents our first parents as addressing to the Lord of 
light and life, the power which has infused their energies 
into all these things, whose might thej continually declare 
and whose praises they continually show forth. When we con- 
sider that the sun is the immediate source of these energies, 
is it any wonder that Sun-worship was the religion of man 
at an early stage of his development ? Nor can it be any 
wonder that when he came to perceive that the sun with its 
system of attendant planets, which at one time seemed the 
universe to him, was but a little thing in a galaxy of suns 
and stars, no more than an atom-cluster in an innumerable 
multitude of similar atom-clusters extending through un- 
fathomable space, he rose to a wider and higher and more 
abstract conception of the Power in Heaven which fixed the 
stars in their places and holds the planets in their orbits, 
which appointed the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule 
the night on earth, and in which all things there live and move 
and have their being. But however high and far in its widen- 
ing conception of the universe human thought may relegate 
God to the tenuity of the abstract, it remains certain that 
for us practically and for our earth the sun is all in all, and 
that when its light and heat expire all those energies on 
earth which it animates will expire also. 

The common law of life is slow acquisition, equilibrium 
for a time, then a gentle decline that soon becomes I rapid 
decay, and finally death. It is a law which governs tho 
growth, decline, and fall of nations as well as of individuals, 
for a nation, being a complex union of very complexly con- 
stituted individuals, cannot any more than they continue for 
ever in one stay. Nor can humanity as a whole escape the 
doom thus plainly decreed for it. If the force at the bad 
all becoming on earth is that which the sun has steadily 

■ Paradise Lost, Book V., pp. 180-200. 



\ 



320 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

supplied to it through countless ages, and still steadily 
supplies, it is plain that when it fails, as fail it one day 
must, there will be a steadily declining development and a 
rapidly increasing degeneration of things, an undoing by 
regressive decompositions of what has been done by pro- 
gressive combinations through the succession of the ages. 
The disintegrating process may be expected to take effect 
first in the highest products of evolution and to reach in 
deepening succession the low, lower, and lowest organisa- 
tions and organic compounds. The nations that have risen 
high in complexity of development will degenerate and be 
broken up, to have their places taken by less complex associa- 
tions of inferior individuals ; they in turn will yield place to 
simpler and feebler unions of still more degraded beings ; 
species after species of animals and plants will first degenerate 
and then become extinct, as the worsening conditions of life 
render it impossible for them to continue the struggle for 
existence ; a few scattered families of degraded human 
beings living perhaps in snowhuts near the equator, very 
much as Esquimaux live now near the pole, will represent 
the last wave of the receding tide of human existence before 
its final extinction ; until at last a frozen earth incapable of 
cultivation is left without energy to produce a living particle 
of any sort and so death itself is dead. 1 

The inevitable end of all that is done under the sun when 
the sun itself is extinguished is a world undone — a world, 
that is, become inorganic in the reverse way of that by 
which it became organic. We have only to reflect how hard 
and mean, torpid and incomplete, human life is now in those 
frozen regions of the north where its bare continuance is 
precarious, and how paralysing are the effects upon human 
activity of an exceptionally severe winter in those temperate 
parts where it is usually in full vigour, to perceive that no 
great or prolonged cold will be needed to wither all the 
finer feelings and the loftier aspirations of mankind, and to 

1 All this, if the world perishes by the processes of what may be called 
natural decay. But there are equal chances, according to the astronomers, 
that it will come to a premature and violent end, the elements being melted 
with fervent heat owing to the fall of a comet into the sun. 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 82 1 

bring to an end all the higher forma of its energy. Nor is 
it without interest to note how ancient and widespread has 
been the notion that the world would relapse into chaofl 
again. Lucretius was content to believe it on grounds of 
reason without desiring to witness it — 

Qaod procul a nobis flectat fortnna gubernana : 
Et ratio potius quam res pcrsuadeat ipsa. 

Once the dissolution of things has got full start and way, 
it will be vastly quicker than the evolution has been; for 
the degenerate products of social disintegration will not 
fail, like morbid elements in the physiological organism or 
like the poisonous products of its own putrefaction, to act 
as powerful disintegrants, and to hasten by their anti-social 
energies the downward course. Not that humanity will 
retrograde quickly through the exact stages of its former 
slow and tedious progress, as every child now goes quickly 
forwards through them : it will not in fact reproduce savages 
with the simple mental qualities of children, but new and 
degenerate varieties with special repulsive characters — 
savages of a decomposing civilisation, as we might call 
them — who will be ten times more vicious and noxious, and 
infinitely less capable of improvement, than the savages of a 
primitive barbarism ; social disintegrants of the worst kind, 
because bred of the corruption of the best organic develop- 
ments, with natures and properties virulently anti-social. 
We may note now that degenerate nations which have fallen 
far from their once high estate do not recover it, and that 
they are really more difficult to lift into the path of progress 
than barbarous nations that have never known a higher 
state: they have exhausted the self-conservative impulse of 
evolution and are a fit soil to breed and nurse the r etr ogr a de 
products of disintegration. In the progressive com muni I 
of to-day we have only to do with such products as occasional 
intruders — sporadic occurrences that are foreign to the social 
constitution, which, inspired with strong vital energy, is able 
to thwart and to eliminate them; but when it has entered 
upon the path of its decline they will predominate and meal 
with no counteracting resistance in the healthy vigour of a 



322 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

growing social organism. So then we may read the lesson 
thus : as the products of organic decomposition are fatal to 
the organism, if not eliminated or counteracted, and the 
most virulent and fatal those that are derived from the cor- 
ruption of its own substance, so the products of social 
disintegration will be fatal to social integration, when they 
are not eliminated or counteracted, and the most virulent 
disintegrants of a nation or society those that are the pro- 
ducts of its own social corruption. 

If we are minded to guess what will be the effect of the 
waning of the evolutional or generative force in nature 
upon the feelings and aspirations and energies of mankind, 
consider the effects that follow the waning of it in the 
individual. Contrast the different mental characters of 
puberty, of manhood, of old age: the overflowing energy 
of the first, its raptures of love, its generous enthu- 
siasms and fervent hopes, its expansive friendships, its 
bright and lofty ideals, its ambitions to do great things, 
its eager desire of fame — all attesting an exuberance of 
evolutional energy ; next the more sober ideals of ripe man- 
hood, when the vital energy has attained and maintains an 
equilibrium with its environment — activity of more measured 
kind, sedater judgment, a great cooling of enthusiasms and 
inflamed hopes, calculated amities, colder and clearer reason, 
and therewith a considerable disillusioning whereby the 
estimate of the value of immediate fame sinks much and 
gives place rather to the ambition of a larger and more last- 
ing fame in the mouths of a wiser posterity; lastly, the 
mental effects of age, as it quenches gradually the ag- 
gressive energies of life, disturbing the equilibrium in 
favour of the environment, and leaves the self-conserving 
energies more than they can do to hold their own. Among 
these effects are the extinction of the ideal in a contracted 
egoism ; an almost entire absorption in the present and its 
pursuits, or at any rate a very small regard to the future, 
especially to that great future which is so near at hand ; a 
life in sensations and habits ; obtuse or cynical indifference 
to the opinion of cotemporaries or of posterity, if the natural 
vanity of a vain character has not grown to excess in the 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 323 

decaying soil of senility; oftentimes an intensely persistent 
grasp of what was possessed and an obstinate desire to be 
what he has been, attesting the self-conservative struggle of 
failing vitality to hold that which threatens to slip from it; 
decay of all enthusiasms and of the finer moral sensibili 
incapacity to feel real sympathy with the joys and sorrows 
of others, or indeed to feel deeply any sorrow ; overmuch de- 
liberation in endless repetitions without executive energy to 
resolve and to accomplish ; no expansive desire or hope to 
propagate an esteemed name amongst living kind or through 
the ages, the desire, if any, being a joyless habit, like the 
possibly still feebly surviving reproductive function. It is a 
pregnant lesson and a grim forewarning : a lesson that the 
extinction of the reproductive energy of the individual is the 
extinction not of his desire only to propagate his bodily kind, 
but of his desire to propagate himself mentally through the 
ages ; a forewarning that what is taking place day by day in 
individual life will one last long day take place in the life of 
the race. Is it any wonder then that the generative force in 
nature, under one guise or another, has been the object of 
worship in so many religions, when worship is itself an out- 
come and incident of it? 

What an awful contemplation, that of the human race 
bereft of its evolutional energy, disillusioned, without 
enthusiasm, without hope, without aspiration, without an 
ideal ! To it now such an issue may well appear incredible, 
since youth and energy cannot believe sincerely, can only 
think it believes, in decay and death. Perhaps it will be 
declared repugnant to reason to suppose that mankind could 
cherish ideals, and thus far ever rising ideals, were these 
not destined some time to have full realisation somewhere ; 
and much more so to believe that, having reached its zenith, 
these will give place to ever worsening ideals of ever wi 
ing states of things, as the foregoing theory of human 
extinction assumes will happen. But the instinctive repug- 
nance ought not to count as a fact of much weight : in the first 
place, it is no argument against death that lift* in full energy 
has a repugnance to it and cannot realise it ; in the m 
place, the extinction of evolutional energy that must follow 



J 



324 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

the gradual extinction of solar energy will involve in its con- 
sequences the extinction of the upward-tending ideal, and 
mankind will go on contentedly with a downward-tending 
ideal, or anti-ideal, without feeling it to be such, just as declin- 
ing nations do now, any forlorn Cassandra that may raise a 
warning cry meeting her eternal fate of being unheeded ; 
and in the third place, if there be an intuitive truth in the 
hope and conviction of a future realisation of lofty ideals, it 
does not follow that the realisation will take place on earth. 
It is perchance a cosmic instinct of the matter of which we 
are constituted. In the countless millions of space-pervading 
orbs it may have been and may be again the functions of 
many to take up the tale of organic evolution and to carry 
the process to higher and higher levels, even to organisations 
that are utterly inconceivable to us, constituted as we are. 
For us men and for our salvation the earth and its sun are 
all in all, but in the universe and its evolution new heavens 
and new earths may be natural incidents, and the whole solar 
system to which the earth belongs of no greater moment than 
the life of the meanest insect is in the history of that system, of 
no greater proportion than a moment in its duration. How 
grotesquely ludicrous then the absurdity of man's vainly at- 
tempted conceptions of a great final cause or purpose of 
things ! In order to conceive a cosmic final cause it would be 
necessary for tbe individual to achieve the abolition of time, 
which is the mere condition of human thought, and to acquire 
the power of thinking beyond himself, which would be the 
abolition of himself. Let an insect, born in the morning and 
dying of old age in the following midnight, be supposed to 
think as we think, it might well believe it impossible that 
the glorious pageant of the rising sun, with the accompany- 
ing awakening of animal and vegetable life, its waxing 
brightness into the full splendour of noontide, and its 
gradual waning through evening twilight into darkness, 
could be the worthy end and purpose of such great events. 
Although it would be the absolute end for it, and could not 
by it be thought otherwise, it would not be the end, since 
after the darkness another day would dawn and countless 
other days after that, as countless days had dawned before. 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 325 

So may it well be with the universe as revealed through 
human relations. Before our world was an innumerable 
multitude of worlds were, and after it has been an innumer- 
able multitude of worlds will be. Even though righteous- 
ness never reign on earth, and the belief of that blefl 
consummation be an illusion with which man dupes himself 
into faith and self-sacrifice, righteousness may still have 
reigned, may even now reign, and may reign hereafter in the 
universe. Those who believe in the fall of man from a hi<>-h 
state of happiness and perfection which he once enjoyed on 
earth, the dim memory of which remains in him as an ideal 
to aspire to and to regain, so accounting to themselves for 
the otherwise inexplicable existence of the ideal in him, 
ought to transfer the scene and date of Paradise to another 
planet of another solar system countless ages ago. Let them 
then discover in the matter of this earth a kind of dimly 
instinctive intimation or memory of its experiences from all 
eternity, and amongst them of the experience that it once 
had of that better life in the defunct planet or planets of 
which it formed part. 

If the evolutional nisus in nature, and in man as a part 
of it, inspires idealism, its failure must be the avatar of 
pessimism. The highest becoming of things, the highest 
expression of which is in the best human feeling, imagination 
and will, then will come to an end, and in its stead will pre- 
vail a lower becoming of things, first manifest in the highest 
human feeling, imagination and w T ill. No throb more will 
be felt of that mysterious inspiration which has been thought 
supernatural, and which, whatever its source, has created 
ideals and inflamed aspirations, has infused a sacred and 
authoritative sanction into morality, and has taken form in 
so many inadequate human representations; and in place of 
these dethroned divinities there will be no aspiration, no 
holy sense of duty, no belief, only dreary apathy or torpid 
resignation. Pessimism declaring the extinction of illusions 
will then actually, as sometimes now theoretically, make for 
itself an ideal of despair and be content with its gloomj con- 
ceit. Be that so or not, however, it may justly be doubted 
whether it is anything more than illusive imagination that 



326 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

foresees, as crown of organic evolution, a race of placid beings 
bound together in unity of spirit, making the whole earth busy 
with their peaceful industries, persuaded rationally of the folly 
of war, and living lives of good-will and good works to one 
another ; whether in fact such a consummation would not 
mean the emasculation, physical, moral, and intellectual, of 
the race. 

Is it so certain as it is assumed to be, that a higher moral 
evolution, should it take place, will tend necessarily to the 
greater happiness of mankind ? More refined and delicate 
sentiments may render an individual too sensitive morally, 
and therefore painfully vulnerable in a world the inarch of 
which is marked by no little brutal force. He may become 
hyper-sensitive morally as well as physicrJly. A certain rude 
and blunt vigour of fibre is a necessary endowment of the 
man who is framed in mind and body to succeed well in 
practical life. The survival of the fittest is not commonly 
the survival of the finest nature. It would be plain ruin for 
any one to attempt to realise a lofty ideal in his daily busi- 
ness where he is brought into competition with others who 
act on a system of reticence, dissimulation, and overreaching. 
Do not crushed sensibilities, disillusionment and despair 
cause many more suicides than cancer and other painful and 
hopeless diseases? Certainly it is not idiots and animals 
that commit suicide. In order that morality may succeed 
in the world it will be necessary for the immoral to make a 
beginning. 

If a disillusioned and degenerative end of mankind on earth 
has been forefixed from the beginning, it would seem that we 
ought to observe here and there, and from time to time in 
its history, forewarning indications of that consummation, 
more especially now when it has plainly reached a high stage 
of self- reflection. May it not be that we are in daily presence 
of such foretokens without thinking enough of their meaning ? 
Are there not faintly heard from time to time, afar off, the 
solemn tolls of destiny which, though hearing them, we un- 
derstand not? Metaphysical disquisitions concerning the 
reality of an external world ; scepticism as to the very founda- 
tions of knowledge, and doubts whether all that we see and 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 327 

seem is not pure illusion — a dream within a dream ; elaborate 
introspective self-analyses ; thin and shrieking sentimentali- 
ties ; emasculated sensualities in art masquerading as art for 
art's sake ; the increase of sorrow that increase of knowledge 
is ; the conviction of the utter vanities of all things under the 
sun, which has been the experience of the greatest sages and 
is the central truth at the heart of all religions ; the multi- 
plication of suicides from life-weariness or from impotence 
to face life's struggles : — all these and the like maladies of 
self-consciousness, notably absent in the animal and un- 
civilised man, where generative energy is in full vigour and 
has not become self-conscious, what are they but proofs 
that the highest achievements of thought sever the unity of 
man and nature and bring doubt and disillusion ? It is not 
man who, as a being separate from nature, prophesies thus 
of it, but nature that testifies of itself in him. They are 
its forewarning intimations of inevitable decline and death ; 
the proof that nature itself is reaching a stage of develop- 
ment at which disillusioning begins. 

The oiganised system of belief in the ideal and of the 
pretence of belief that it is being realised will no doubt con- 
tinue for a time after genuine belief has expired. But not 
for ever ; when there is no longer the aspiration to realise 
the ideal, the inclination to idealise the real will fail also. 
The elaborately organised pretences of virtue through the 
systematic concealments of vice will not be kept up, and life 
will be viewed in its bare misery and vanity. Men will feel 
the wish in life, as they now give thanks at death, to be 
delivered from the burden of the flesh and from the miseries 
of this sinful world. Those are the fervent thanks that they 
solemnly give to Almighty God when death has removed one 
of them from a life which at the same time they eagerly 
pretend to consider a blessing. Solomon, the wisest and 
wealthiest man that ever lived, who exhausted the poten- 
tialities of enjoyment, and Job, the most afflicted and most 
patient of men, who exhausted the potentialities of suffering, 
came to much the same conclusion with regard to the vexa- 
tion, vanity, and littleness of human life. To the same 
conclusion, explicit or implicit, must the human race 0O1 



328 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

too in the end. And a sad and sadly significant thing it 
will be when the entertainment and adoration of the ideal 
are extinguished in the mind. 

To point out in a clear exposition that each of the tokens 
I have mentioned has the meaning which I have ascribed to 
it would carry me far beyond the proper scope of this essay. 
From among other instances of distempered self-conscious- 
ness that might be meditated upon, consider for a moment 
the frequent degeneration of sound sentiment into shrieking 
sentimentality. Instead of deep, calm, restrained, and 
massive feeling, fusing intelligence and activity into whole 
and wholesome unity, than which nothing can be more 
excellent and beautiful, there is everywhere the shrill outcry 
of thin sentimentalities, which are the outcome of exagge- 
rated egoisms — a true egoistic hyperesthesia — and actually 
tlisintegrant in their effects. Do you require a particular 
instance of repulsive sentimentalisms that are no better than 
a shameless and indecent exposure of feelings ? Take one 
which the awe of its subject cannot help lending a certain 
dignity to — the howling displays of self-consciousness that 
are shown nowadays with respect to the event and the circum- 
stances of death, notwithstanding that to die is as natural 
and common as to be born. Nobody of the least note dies 
but we are told with clamour of grief and convulsive sobs 
which might be thought to express the deepest distress — 
though they really are the luxury of incontinent feeling — that 
the most amiable, the most accomplished, the most witty, 
the most wise, the best of men has been taken from us, and 
that the loss is an irreparable calamity to mankind. And 
this though he may have been eighty years old and almost 
in his dotage ! As if anybody ever dies of whom it can be 
truly said that it is of the least consequence to mankind in 
the long run when he dies ; or as if his resurrection a few 
months after his death would not be a most embarrassing 
and unwelcome event. Contrast this modern incontinence 
of emotion with the calm, chaste, and manly simplicity of 
Homer, as we observe it, for example, in his description of 
the death of Achilles : — 



V 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 329 

The grey dawn glimmered, and the ebbing tide 

Slipped from the naked sands about the ships, 

And drained Scamander of its full-fed life. 

But in the Grecian Camp was life and stir, 

Neighing of full-fed steeds, and clank of arms, 

And trumpet-calls and marshalling of men ; 

For that this day the Master of the War, 

Pelides' self, should take the field, and sweep 

The Trojan battle from the plains of Troy. 

So men, unknowing, spake ; and from his tents, 

With godlike step and godlike in his face, 

Achilles came. And all about his limbs 

The wondrous armour which the Fire-God wrought, 

Helmet and cuirass, cuisses, and the shield 

Sevenfold, and shapely greaves, that shot their light 

Down on the naked marble of his feet. 

His look was as of one who knew not care, 

Nor memory of the past, nor things to come ; 

Not the dead comrade, nor the fell revenge, 

Nor shame of slaughtered warriors at the pyre, 

Nor lust of ravished maid, nor sullen strife, 

Nor the short span, and swiftly-severed thread, — - 

But only present triumph. 

To the front 
He strode ; and shading with an upraised hand 
His level glance, gazed at the Trojan lines, 
Which, thrice as far as bowmen shoot the bow, 
Were clustering, thick as ants in harvest-time 
Cluster around their harried nest, and brave 
With weak defence the ruin that impends. 
But one was in their van, who seemed in shape, 
In grace, and nimbleness, and fatal gift 
Of beauty, like the shepherd-prince who lured 
The love of Spartan Helen from her lord. 
No man was near him, none seemed 'ware of him ; 
Alone he stood, unhelmed, and round his head 
The rising sun, smiting the rising mist, 
Broke in a sudden glory ; and behind, 
High up, the towers of angry Pallas frowned. 
No armour had he, save that in his hand 
A golden bow was bended to the full ; 
And as Achilles turned, with curving lip, 
Contemptuous, to his men, an arrow sang, 
22 



330 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

And cleft the middle air, and dipped, and plunged 

Full on the naked marble of his foot. 

Through high-arched instep, ankle, and the strings 

That bind the straining heel, it sped, and nailed 

The wolf-skin sandal to the crimson sand. 

Slow on one knee he sank, his strong, right hand 

Staying his fall, and watched with steady eye 

The full life draining from the wound, and spake, — 

1 Mother, thy word was true. The end is come.' 

Nor ever spake again. 

Consider again the fact of suicide, which is a sort of con- 
vulsive climax of pessimism. From a purely psychological 
point of view it must be acknowledged the most momentous 
example of freewill on human record. Convinced of a life 
after death, and of a life that will be a life of unspeakable 
joy or of unspeakable woe according to the deeds done in the 
flesh, assured that suicide will precipitate him into an abyss 
of endless suffering, the unhappy person nevertheless reck- 
lessly perpetrates it when his misery on earth is greater 
than that which he believes he is able to bear. Against it 
there is every motive that can influence a conscious being, so 
that the act is, qua consciousness, the most wonderfully 
illogical act of which any one can be guilty : either a stupen- 
dous example of freewill or a reductio ad absurdum of the 
doctrine. Manifestly there is a deeper and more powerful 
motive at work than any conscious motives ; for certainly 
that which happens in nature cannot be illogical in the logic 
of nature ; and without doubt it would be perceived by con- 
sciousness to be logical enough could consciousness only 
survive to justify it. An instinct deeper and truer than any 
conscious belief declares the certainty of relief. The motive 
is irresistibly impellent, because it is the total outcome in 
consciousness of the failure of vital energies and of the there- 
from resulting sufferings of the individual elements of the 
tissues. When these energies have been exhausted gradually 
by the decay of age, the individual hopes and quietly waits for 
the release of death ; when they are deficient naturally, or are 
prematurely exhausted either by sudden and overwhelming 
prostration or slowly by steadily sapping causes, physical 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 331 

or moral, he precipitates violently the release that they crave. 
For the conscious result is an utter dreariness of feeling, a 
loss of interest in and hold on external events, a repugnance 
to the vanity of hope, a supreme life-weariness. Those who 
have made mental pathology a study know well that there 
is no more powerful cause of individual suicide than the pre- 
mature loss of the evolutional energy, mental and bodily. If 
suicide be not the upshot, there is perhaps an abandonment 
to the use of alcohol or opium which, stimulating the flagging 
energies, creates a temporary ideal, or to chloral or similarly 
acting drugs that produce a temporary insensibility : a false 
refuge, since they inevitably make matters worse in the end. 
'Tis a way of making Hell by a mad attempt to find Heaven. 

Obviously this is not the best of all possible worlds, since 
men have conceived a better in the shape of a Paradise that 
has been and is to come ; nor is it the worst of all possible 
worlds, since they have conceived a worse in the shape of a 
Hell. Meanwhile it is sure to get either better or worse. 
Whether it will get better, and, if so, for how long, or whether 
it will get worse, and, if so, how soon, are questions that it is 
signal presumption on our part to imagine we can answer. 
That it will get better for a long time to come, but worse ill 
the end, is a theory that seems to suit well with the explicit 
truths of human thought and with the implicit truths of 
human conduct; for mankind is as optimistic in theory as it 
is pessimistic in practice. Visions of golden ages, of extinc- 
tions of wars and other calamities, of reigns of righteousness 
and universal brotherhood, and the like, are evolved as 
excellent ideals to inspire and guide the units in their strug- 
gles ; but the acts of practical life are none the less imbued 
with the implicit certitude that the respective sums of vice 
and virtue will not change, and that the race will be very 
much what it has been until its doom is accomplished. 
What, then, shall we say? That it is well to proclaim and 
extol the ideal, as M. Eenan does, reserving only the right 
to laugh quietly in his sleeve ? 

It is almost literally true of social evolution that we know 
not what a day may bring forth. Even if civilisation pro- 
gresses in the direction of softening characters and fcbo- 



332 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL. 

lishing wars, it does not follow that the result will be a 
certain good ; for it may be to dry up the sources of the 
virtues and to enervate mankind morally. Again, if the pre- 
valence of ease, luxury, and self-indulgence be so great in 
a nation as to threaten its speedy decadence, an unforeseen 
reaction may occur suddenly and issue in the revival of 
austerity and asceticism, and so pessimism give place to ideal- 
ism ; for the reformer is the proper product of evil times. 
We cannot predict that in time to come some new develop- 
ment of feeling may not take place which shall be as high 
above moral feeling as moral feeling is high above the most 
primitive egoistic passion, and of a nature as inconceivable 
to us as moral feeling would have been to a primitive savage. 
Nor can we" predict that a great invention may not be made 
any day, which shall change the whole face of the earth and 
modify profoundly men's relations to it and to one another. 
Suppose that man had lived at a time when the simple ele- 
ments had not yet formed their more complex organic 
compounds, could he have foretold in the least from the 
basis of the then existing organic substances what higher 
compounds were to be formed in the future, although they 
were on the brink of formation ? Assuredly not ; and yet 
in that case he would have had to do with simple elements 
and comparatively simple operations of nature, whereas in 
the social evolution of the race we have to do with the most 
complex elements and the most complex operations in the 
world. How idle and presumptuous, then, the pretence to 
forecast it ! What account would a Koman philosopher of 
the time of Augustus, venturing to divine the future of 
Europe, have taken of the babe that ' all meanly wrapt in a 
rude manger lay * in a small town of a remote province of the 
empire ; and what sort of a business would he have made of 
his predictions ? The philosopher of to-day who can tell 
us what happened when the foundations of the earth were 
laid and the morning stars sang together will no doubt be 
ready to tell us exactly what will happen when the founda- 
tions of the earth are unlaid and the morning stars shall 
cease to sing together ; those who have not his confident 



WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 333 

insight into creations and uncreations will be content to 
hold their peace, lest they should speak without knowledge 
words that are without wisdom. But be the words spoken 
the words of folly or of wisdom, they are in the end alike 
vanity. ' All that which is past is as a Dream ; and he 
that hopes or depends upon Time coming, dreams waking/ 



WORKS OF HENRY HADDSLEY, M. D, 

Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians ; Professor of Medical 
Jurisprudence in University College, London. 



Body and Mind : 

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